General Updates

Divasonic Northwest American Tour Dates, Wednesday August 27 through Friday August 30Published August  26, 2008

Come see Divasonic on their Northwest tour - this week ONLY!

• Wednesday August 27th Mt. Tabor Theater – Lounge Portland, OR 8pm
• Thursday August 28th Everyday Music Bellingham, WA 3:00pm
• Thursday August 28th Three Trees Music Bellingham, WA 7pm
• Friday August 29th Bop Street Records Seattle, WA 8pm
• Friday August 30th Tost Lounge Seattle, WA 9pm (Performing with I9 and Manazma Sheen)

August 5, 2008: A Very Good Day And A Very Bad Day, Too!Published August  5, 2008

We don't normally post a website bulletin such as this, but as it occurred, it should be detailed for those in the audience who were curious. This was our worst day for quality of service (QoS) in several months. However this coincided with a planned effort to upload a boat load of new tracks to our production server - a task that has taken about two weeks to prepare from a huge influx of new music that our new partner labels and artist friends have sent us (thank goodness we now have volunteers!).

Our host in Toronto had a carrier outage which began affecting Groovera's quality of service (QoS) Sunday night and continued to affect us for about 18 hours. Our founder's first set of tasks this morning was to troubleshoot all points of failure on our end (there were none) and then to contact our vendor in Toronto for help. With no response from the vendor, we soon thought they were all out having a long lunch, but instead it turned out it was August Civic Holiday in Canada and our contacts were actually on the beach enjoying a beautiful day. Well, we at Groovera love water and sunshine too, and we were glad to hear from them replying back even when we ourselves would have turned off our cell phones! We were assured - and to no surprise, either - that we were not the only customer of theirs affected. And even though we got help within a couple of hours after submitting a support ticket, the outage occurred again shortly after the problem was said to be solved. At least we have a backup server (a very solid server, BTW - the same one that had served Groovera streams between September 2005 and May 2008), a high-quality DSL connection (not cable broadband!), and a perfect redundant copy of all Groovera services on the backup server. This allowed us to run the station from Quigley's living room just as in the early days except with better service quality and top-notch professional-grade equipment! The trouble is that we were forced to alternate between our leased server in Toronto and our home-based backup more than twice today...and it was ugly, folks, as you could already tell.

The good news is that since we are serving the source to our streams from the backup server today, we are able to immediately play for you the new material that we will have on our production server in Toronto between Wednesday and Friday this week. Combined, it comes to about 500 tracks of more good stuff for all Groovera channels! Also today, we changed the 56kbps AAC+ v.2 streams to 64kbps AAC+ v.1 for broader media player support. It's still means more bandwidth than we want to be using, but it's well worth it for everyone.

The streams are all stable right now and hopefully when our vendor is back from their national holiday on Tuesday, we will be back to normal operation again. For now - until we are back to using our vendor's server - you shouldn't notice any difference in your quality of service.

Groovera Has Reached Its July 17 Financial Goal!Published July 17, 2008On July 10, 2008, we were out of internal budget and at risk of losing our MP3 streams today. We had the great fortune of nearly sixty members of our audience responding to our fundraising efforts and coming forward with large and small contributions to keep the streams online through August. Many, many thanks to all of you who "shared the love" with your donations, keeping all Groovera services alive to serve you for another month! Special thanks to those of you who made large lump-sum donations and to those who enrolled in our membership program! We will be putting together our gallery pages very soon and will be contacting each of you for pictures, brief bio's and hyperlinks to your websites to showcase on these gallery pages very soon!

Even as we had reached our financial goals for mid-July through mid-August, our overhead expenses are only covered for one month, through August 15. We still need ongoing financial support and there are still hundreds of thousands more listeners who tune in monthly and still have not yet "shared the love" with a contribution. We need your help, too, in order to continue providing you this service and we still need budget for mid-August through mid-September and onward. The combined membership subscription amounts yielded this week still only cover a small fraction of our monthly operation costs. We are ever-grateful for these and your added membership strengthens each other that joins our effort, as well as the one-time "love offering" contributions we receive.

If you have not participated yet, our battle is only "won" temporarily and Groovera still needs your contributions! For more information on how you can be a part of keeping Groovera online, please visit our Share The Love page to learn how you can help Groovera remain in full service, with no commercial interruptions, and providing quality chillout music programming for months and years to come. If you have additional questions, please also visit our "Sharing The Love FAQ"

Thank you for being part of Groovera and for allowing us to continue building your life's soundtrack!

UPDATE: Workaround For iTunes 7.5+ Stream Playback IssuesPublished March  25, 2008 We burned the midnight oil last night testing a theory as to why our station has been having problems with iTunes versions 7.5 through 7.6.1. Since Groovera was one of the very few affected, the immediate conclusion was it could have something to do with our stream intros. We re-encoded our intros, fine-tuned a few stream encoding settings, restarted everything, and left iTunes 7.6.1 for PC running overnight. It was flawless. We upgraded back to 7.6.1 on our other machines and ran them all day, too, flawlessly. We also observed other iTunes listener traffic today to watch for underruns and there were very few. We cannot be sure that we have fixed the problem, but we are satisfied that an improvement has certainly been made in order to workaround this iTunes issue. Even if we have pinpointed the problem and mitigated it for ourselves, it does not fix what is wrong with iTunes but only keeps it from failing when tuning in to Groovera streams.

If you had experienced the problem previously and still encounter this issue OR it has been resolved, please let us know. Thank you!

Stream Playback Issues With iTunes Versions 7.5 through 7.6.1Published March  19, 2008, Updated March 24, 2008We have received several reports from users of iTunes versions 7.5 through 7.6.1 that they have had buffering problems with Groovera streams. After several days of troubleshooting and investigation, we have learned from reading the Apple support forums that the problem occurs in these later versions of iTunes and affects video streaming as well as other web radio stations in the iTunes radio directory. This does not happen to every iTunes 7.5+ user but we were able to confirm this issue ourselves with an installation of the recent 7.6.1 release, uninstalling, and installing in its place iTunes 7.4.3.1. No conclusions or fixes have been released yet and while this buffering problem does not happen to every radio stream listed in iTunes radio, we have yet to figure out why Groovera is one of the few. We also have observed this does not happen to every user of these later versions of iTunes.

Other Options

Although iTunes is most beloved and a great friend to Groovera, we have to suggest you either uninstall iTunes 7.5 and later and go with iTunes 6.0 or use another media player until the iTunes problem is solved. If you decide to go the route of installing an older version of iTunes and you have a library of purchases from the iTunes store, be absolutely sure to take every precaution to back up your iTunes music library and playlists. You can download 7.4 and earlier versions for both Mac and PC at OldApps.com, however we do not support iTunes versions older than 6.

Instead of facing the risks and rigors of re-installing an older version of iTunes, we recommend instead simply installing a second media player to offer you options and advantages not offered by iTunes. The following recommendations support Groovera's best streams which are encoded in near CD-quality AAC+ - the same codec used by XM Radio and is unfortunately not supported by iTunes (as a matter of fact, once iTunes begins to support AAC+, we will eliminate our MP3 streams in favor of AAC+. No joke.)

For Mac users, the recommended alternative for web radio listening is VLC Player. The only caveat is that Groovera only allows VLC Player on our AAC+ streams and it will not play successfully on any of our MP3 streams, whether on Mac OR PC.

For PC users, Winamp is good alternative but we recommend instead Foobar2000, a highly configurable client with low system overhead that is built more for quality sound than appearance.

We hope to figure out very soon the cause of this incompatibility with the latest iTunes version and our MP3 streams. We suspect it has something to do with its newer handling of stream intros although this is unconfirmed and we are doing our best to attempt a workaround from our end. But in the meantime, at least we know exactly what the alternatives are. Nonetheless, we still love iTunes and are most grateful for all that they are....

Thank you for listening!

Brand New Media Server, New Website Host and Stream Titles RestoredNovember 25, 2007 After Groovera was hacked on November 12, we have had persistent service issues and outages. Perhaps many of the issues were only uncovered by the malicious activity rather than resulting from it, but the past two weeks have been dedicated to solidifying our service and pushing its quality to our highest benchmarks yet. With this effort, we have addressed every complaint received within previous weeks by mitigating each corresponding issue. As of today, we have our strongest level of service yet.

Here is what we have done:

• Replaced the old frontline server - the one you connect directly to for the radio streams - with a brand new machine with about four times the power of its predecessor
• Replaced our old "crossover" configuration between the encoder and the frontline server by moving them to live within the same subnet in the datacenter - they literally live on the same rack together now
• Both servers now live on a new subnet within the datacenter altogether, eliminating interference activity from peers on the previous subnet - we now have ALL new IP addresses
• Fixed the issue with the broken stream titles
• Hired a new web host so now song updates on the website no longer lag and page load speeds are tripled

• iTunes Store purchase linkage
• Refactor our music stream menu to allow "What's Playing" info to be loaded on homepage without having to launch music stream (most beneficial to iTunes listeners)
• Easier location of "Recent 3" link
• "New Arrivals" page
• Searchable "What Played?" database
• Searchable Album/Artist database

Now Enjoy Groovera Streams In Parametric Stereo aacPlus!April 1, 2007 With AAC+ (aka. HE-AAC, aacPlus), our streams are now available with higher quality sound than ever before - and at only 48kbps! So, now with a dial-up connection, you can enjoy higher quality sound than even our 128kbps streams deliver. Compliment the high quality stream with a high-end sound system or with a good pair of headphones and you'll be in musical dreamland. You will immediately be as amazed as we were to hear the tremendous improvement in the sound. To get started, you must have a media player that is compatible with AAC+. Then simply click "Listen Now" under our logo at the top of every page and select the AAC+ option of any stream from our menu. Here is a list of the aacPlus media player that we have confirmed:

• Winamp 5.0 or newer (PC)
• Foobar2000 (PC)
• VLC (Mac)
• XMMS (Linux, with the xmms-aac package)

• Winamp users with the mp3PRO plug-in must uninstall the mp3PRO plug-in to use AAC+ streams. We don't stream in mp3PRO anymore, so you won't need it here.
• iTunes plans to release a future version with AAC+ support, but unfortunately does not currently play AAC+ music streams. Stay tuned!
• Orban has released an AAC/aacPlus plugin for Windows Media Player, however, I've yet to see it actually work after numerous attempts to deploy it in the past year. The WMPlugins.com page for this plug-in is filled with helpless complaints describing the same problems we encountered.

Technical Status (U.S. Pacific Time)

- No known issues at the moment.