Page Type: REFERENCE
Monitoring mode ensures that the player stays near real-time (does not fall into the past, even if there is more content than can be played.)
Monitoring mode is selected by clicking on the radio receiver icon on the top bar of the Rangecast player. When Monitoring mode is selected, this icon will show in white.
Since Rangecast gives you access to all the audio being received on multiple scanner radios, it is common that the total quantity of available audio exceeds 1:1 (that is, more than 60 minutes of new audio is recorded in each hour.)
Using the filters in the player, you can restrict your reception in various ways (for example, selecting particular channels of interest.) But if the total quantity of audio on selected channels, and passing through all applied filters, exceeds 1:1 -- and all audio is played -- the effect is that the clock time on the player will slowly fall further and further behind real time. (For example, if at 1 pm you are listening to current audio, and then listen to 75 minutes of audio recorded between 1-2 pm, the clock on the Rangecast player will reach 2 pm at 2:15 pm.)
(You can actually listen on the Rangecast player to MORE than 60 minutes of audio in an hour, by asking the player to speed up audio playback to 200%. If this is done, the player will actually play up to 120 minutes of recorded audio each hour. But it is not easy for most listeners to adapt to such intense speedup.)
Since it is usually more important to lock the player to near-realtime than hear absolutely every transmission, the player provides a mode (Montitoring Mode) where the player will selectively skip some transmissions when necessary to stay current. With this automated feature, you don't need to watch the clock to see if you have fallen behind, or limit the channels you include on the player to stay below 1:1.
Channels may be tagged with a priority level, and transmissions on lower priority channels are the first to be skipped when something must be omitted. This lets you indicate to the player that certain channels are more important than others. When the total load become too high, channels of the lowest importance will be automatically dropped, and will be automatically restored when the loads decline.
When transmissions are compared from channels with equal priority, and something must be skipped to stay current, Monitoring Mode will keep the longer transmissions, and selectively skip the shortest transmissions. This is because short transmissions usually have relatively little content of importance (for instance, an acknowledgement) while longer transmissions are more likely to contain vital information (such as a description of a situation, or a dispatch including an address.)
One of the advantages of Rangecast is that, when two transmissions are broadcast simultaneously, they may be buffered and played in sequence. Therefore Rangecast allows a limited fallback behind current time in Monitoring Mode, so a buffered transmission has an opportunity to play after a simultaneous transmission has completed its playback. Also, for statistical reasons, operating very slightly behind realtime allows for better optimization when choosing what to skip (for example, preferentially keeping content from higher priority channels and dropping content from lower priority channels.) The maximum allowed fallback can be set in the player between 30 seconds (high risk of skipping content even if the overall loads are well below 1:1) and 5 minutes (the recommended value.)
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