Mixlr is all about live broadcasts. Behind every single broadcast you hear on Mixlr is a live, real-time event.
Occasionally however, we find that broadcasts are actually just.. silent. There’s quite a few reasons why this might happen - somebody pulled the cable out, or forgot to turn the broadcast off at the end of the night. Or perhaps it’s even a deliberate tribute to John Cage.
Whatever the reason, as a listener it’s frustrating to visit a live page, expecting to hear a live show or podcast, but hear nothing.
So we pushed out a new feature earlier today to help to address this. We now detect when a live “broadcast” is silent, and let listeners visiting the page know. Here’s what you’ll see if we detect silence:
The notification naturally updates in real-time, so if the silence goes away, so will the notification. And if the broadcast goes silent again, the notification pops back up.
Simple but effective.
As usual, feel free to tell us what you think on Facebook, Twitter or email.
Update: we can confirm there is a timeout of a few seconds to prevent the notification popping up too often. There is also already a warning in our live broadcasting app to alert broadcasters of a silent input (as well as VUmeters) - this feature is just for listeners.
