Controlling your show with Droid or iPhone MIIP

[Caleb Linburg]

I will hopefully be setting mine up this weekend. Late start this year!

[l0chte]

I got 3 songs put in and think everything is set up right but I must have something wrong. The show is playing but the votes never change the song. Baiscly the server can't tell LOR what song to play next? Any idea where I went wrong?

It also doesn't show what the currently playing song is.

Edited November 16, 2012 by l0chte

[ItsMeBobO]

The most common problem is the windows command not running. I should do a video just on that I guess.

When the show player or SE play the song.. it will execute the command...miip.cmd %SEQUENCE_FILENAME_NO_EXT%

Notice there is no location for the command...so windows has to be able to find miip.cmd.. Windows only looks in two places.. the folder of the program running it.. which is LORapp folder. if not there is looks in each folder in your path...one by one. OR if you want you can specify in EACH sequence where miip.cmd is.. C:\Users\Xmas\MIIP.CMD %SEQUENCE_FILENAME_NO_EXT% will work...but it wont look around in the default folders if you do it that way.

Now lets look at MIIP.cmd itself.... all it does is write the name of the song which is starting to play to a file. yours is set like this... > "C:\your folder\MiipClient.txt So the user running miip.cmd must have write access to the destination folder.

So lets test it in various ways... You can open SE and load a sequence...check the windows command. Play... then open the watch file to see its contents...it should be the name of that song just played.. After you look at it.. Delete or overtype it so you can check it again and will know its changed... Another thing to do is open a command window (run cmd) and type miip.cmd xxx most likely will say command not found, unless you are using the path method... So now navigate to Lor app folder.. CD C:\Program Files (x86)\Light-O-Rama miip.cmd xxxxxx will put the xxxxx into the file replacing its contents. If MIIP client is running when you replace the watch file contents it will send a message to the server that the song xxxxx is playing.. But miip will return an error message that there is no such song as xxxxxxx If you want to get a good songstart response you should type the file name of an actual song you have defined. OR you can just do a test play from the miip client Connect web view tab...

Another debug technique is to edit miip.cmd and put PAUSE on the last line. This will cause the dos window to remain open. You can then see any error message such as command not found.

[l0chte]

sf = ECHO is on.

msg = Usually means the song file could not be found. Run the verify. Create the song in MIIP or correct the Windows command to pass the name of the Sequence without .lms

I'll mess with it at lunch but here is this for now.

[alchrisr01]

Hey Bob! Got everything up and running, almost. I made a location change or two in setup but when I run verify I have a few errors that I can't seem to get right.

Command %PATH% ---LORAppPath not found in %PATH%

LORAppPath Command - c:\Program Files (x86)\Light-O-Rama\MIIP.CMD - Not Found

Backgroundfile - C:|Users\chris\Documents\Light-O-Rama\Sequences\2012 sequebces\MiipBackground.txt - Not Found

Verify songs tabs shown everything correct

Connect Web View seems to be working.

WatchFile changes when I change a song and click "test play"

I have read everything I can find but i must be missing something. Thanks, Chris

[ItsMeBobO]

Hey Bob! Got everything up and running, almost. I made a location change or two in setup but when I run verify I have a few errors that I can't seem to get right.

Command %PATH% ---LORAppPath not found in %PATH%

LORAppPath Command - c:\Program Files (x86)\Light-O-Rama\MIIP.CMD - Not Found

Backgroundfile - C:|Users\chris\Documents\Light-O-Rama\Sequences\2012 sequebces\MiipBackground.txt - Not Found

Verify songs tabs shown everything correct

Connect Web View seems to be working.

WatchFile changes when I change a song and click "test play"

I have read everything I can find but i must be missing something. Thanks, Chris

The Command path not found is for people using the Path option for running the MIIP.CMD command. Ignore that one unless you intend to use the path option.

The background file is for having lights on overnight (undocumented feature) Ignore unless you want background sequence.

I see your miip.cmd is in your user folder

UserProfile Command,C:\Users\Chris\MIIP.CMD

So you MUST have a way for windows to find it. Either change each sequence to C:\Users\Chris\MIIP.CMD

OR add C:\Users\Chris\ to your path OR you can copy MIIP.CMD to your LORapp folder and make sure it has rights to execute from there.

You did not have your miip show and miip schedule created using those setup pages. I created a miip show with all songs in it for you and a miip schedule to test. You should change them to suit you.

The last thing you need to do is to put in your LOR schedule. I always suggest 24/7. But you can do other arrangements. Pick MiipShow.lss as the show file.

Edited November 17, 2012 by ItsMeBobO

[l0chte]

I got mine all working thanks to Bob this morning. Now that I have it figured out hopefully early this week I can get everything switched over to the show computer!

Thank You So Much Bob!!!!

Eric

Edited November 17, 2012 by l0chte

[alchrisr01]

Thanks Bob. If I understand correctly i need to change the windows shell command to include the path (C:\Users\Chris\MIIP.CMD). I will first try to find the miip.cmd file and copy it to the LOR folder. I do have a few channels that run background sequences normally when using the LOR show builder (tune to sign and garland fence). Is the backgrpund in miip the same as this or should I just build a miipshow.lss and include these as background sequences?

thanks, chris

[alchrisr01]

I got the miip.cmd file copied over and that fixed the LORAppPath. This should be all that is needed as far as the windows command in the sequences is concerned? I did not change the line in windows shell.

Thanks, chris

[ItsMeBobO]

I got the miip.cmd file copied over and that fixed the LORAppPath. This should be all that is needed as far as the windows command in the sequences is concerned? I did not change the line in windows shell.

Thanks, chris

I think this is the easiest way. However you need to verify its working. Open MiipClient and go to the connect tab. Open SE and play a song with MIIP.CMD in it. you should see the SongStart Response from the server which is in XML form and has the duration in seconds. The poll count will begin counting down and then at zero poll the server for the next song to play based on the votes.

If you dont see the response then SE is not finding MIIP.CMD OR does not have permission to execute it. In Windows explorer right click the folder and select properties then security tab then Edit then Users then full control.

[alchrisr01]

I wanted to give Bob a public thank you. He has written a fun little app and helped me fix a few issues via email. For those who use background sequences in their show, you need to do a few things for them to work with miip. First, use Notepad and create a file with the name of the background file with extention. I just did a copy/paste from the LOR folder. Next, save the file as MiipBackground.txt in the folder where your sequences are located. Please note that you do not need to add the CMD line in the Windows Command for this sequence to work. I did this early this morning and I can't remember exactly, but If I recall correctly Miip will write everything to the MiipShow file. When I open the MiipShow in the LOR show editor that is the only sequence shown and I don't remember adding it. Another issue I had was with one song that would repeat every other song. Bob suggested removing the spaces in the file name in case there was an extra one causing an error. Although that fixed the issue, I did not find any extra so it could be that the file name was too long. If you have similar issues with a song try this fix first.

Thanks again, Bob. Everything works great!

[dougd]

Ran this through the paces last night and it worked flawlessly. I didn't see 1 problem. Cant wait to see how it gets used starting Friday. The Facebook update was a nice one. Thanks Bob!

[l0chte]

I would like to have floods come on overnight, I got this setup and the show ended fine in the morning but because I had to select do not turnoff lights between songs the floods stayed on in the morning.. How do I setup a cleanup sequence with MIIP? Thanks!

[dougd]

Not sure if this is just happening to me or not. It did this both last night and now again tonite, I get the following error while people are voting.

Query inner1 failed: User 'miipadmin' has exceeded the 'max_questions' resource (current value: 75000)

That error appears on any computer that is listing the display songs and the host computer.

When the error appears I can no longer login on the host computer. It fixed itself after about 10 minutes last night.

Fixed itself after about 10 minutes tonight also.

Edited November 26, 2012 by dougd

[ItsMeBobO]

All of miip was locked out of the database for approximately 10 minutes due to reaching the maximum number of queries in an hour which is 75k. It resets every hour on about the half hour.

My apologies to all as I had no idea we would reach a maximum for this account. Now that this is shown itself, some changes can be made.

Mitigation plan.. I have changed all miip accounts to auto refresh less frequently. Some were set as fast as 10 seconds. They are all now 90 seconds

My hosting companies documentation says I can create another user for free and get another 75K. Not sure if that will work as I must determine a way to split queries between the accounts.

At present I do not have a way to determine if miip is reaching the hourly limit. I will be working on that and possibly turning off functions during heavy hours. Like visitor and user stats.

[dougd]

When I choose to use MIIP this season, I decided not to run my commercial for my charity that I use to run every 4-5 songs last year. My donations are way down compared to last year, I know its early and times are tight, but if I decide to start running my commercial for my charity is there a way to do it with MIIP? I will give it another week or so, just exploring my possibility's.

[ItsMeBobO]

You can interlace announcements Doug. I noticed you did not have any and was wondering about that. If you want, go see what other miip users are doing at miip.mobi.

What you do is create a sequence in SE using your charity voice over as the audio. Set that song up in miip and be sure to add the MIIP.CMD Uncheck the "Accept votes for this song" box (you cant vote for annoucements) Then you put in the number of minutes to repeat the announcement. You can have more than one and it tries to spread them out.

Edited November 27, 2012 by ItsMeBobO

[dougd]

Thanks again Bob, I never noticed that option of "repeat every so many minutes" That will defiantly do what I need.

[BillyT]

FYI - I have about a 35 minute show and use 3 different announcements. A welcome announcement, an announcement concering the neighbors and one for miip. I had them set for 15, 17 and 19. They were way too close togerther. I changed them to 30, 45 and 60. With the amount of time I have for the entire show (35 minutes), I guess ideally I would like the announcements to come up about once every 10 minutes or so. Haven't figured out how to get them where I want them better, but still thinking about it.

[dougd]

Well I am going to try one "long" announcement, hopefully no longer than about 45 seconds. I will have my daughter talk really fast. I will try that first.