Audio Playback Management

[DSheirer]

Audio Playback Management Feature

This feature details the design concept and requirements for a new Audio Playback Manager feature. This feature will add a new tab to the right of the 'Now Playing' tab named 'Calls'. This view will allow the user to control audio playback and access a call history with the ability to reselect audio segments to replay.

This new feature will enable creation of a calls API that will allow external applications to access call activity and historical call activity to support network based audio monitoring applications. However, this endpoint and API are out of scope for this issue.

Description

This feature creates a new tab in the sdrtrunk window entitled 'Calls' that will be positioned to the right of the 'Now Playing' window. This view shows a historical table view of call activity that is dynamically updated with the most-recent calls at the top. The application will actively manage the selection of incoming call events for replay in either the mono or left/right audio channels. However, the user can override this behavior and temporarily pin the left or right channel for manual playback selections or to lock-down the audio channel for a specific talkgroup or radio.

Call activity will be logged to a database and all calls will be recorded, at least temporarily. This is essential to allowing the user to select recent call activity for replay. However, after either a time-based or drive space based threshold, calls will be aged off and the audio recordings will be deleted. If the user has designated an alias for recording, those audio files will be retained until the user manually removes them from the recording directory.

Mono/Left/Right audio display panels will be enhanced to provide more information. This will include an indicator of either automatic mode, pinned mode, or manual selection mode. The panels may be enhanced to include: system, site, and from identifier as well as call type (patch, group, telephone, or private).

With the addition of temporary audio recording, drive space becomes an issue. This feature will include a drive space monitoring system that allows the user to specify maximum drive space to use for audio recordings and it will actively manage removing audio files once those thresholds are met. A new status bar at the bottom of the application will provide at-a-glance disk space usage indicator and display warnings when drive space consumption or availability becomean issue.

Various aspects of improved audio playback management is the source of many user requests: #1702, #1616, #1521, #1429, #1128, #1089, #1070, #902, #647, #552, #548, #545, #349, #340, #324, #323, #261, #167, #131, #95, #50

Features / Requirements

• New 'Calls' tab view to the right of the 'Now Playing' tab
• Live calls view show the XXX most recent calls
• Paged table view for historical call activity viewing and search.
• Temporarily Pin a talkgroup or radio to an audio output device (mono/left/right)
• User defined preferred output channel for aliases (talkgroups/radios).
• Optional: expand beyond current mono/stereo options for audio playback devices

Drive Space Monitoring

• Provide user preferences for defining drive space usage constraints and alerting to manage retained recording file storage. (Application Status Bar #1731)
• User interface status bar to illustrate drive space usage and warning indicators. (Application Status Bar #1731)