Is there really no good way to handle crossfades with short jingles?

[fkane]

I've read the details at https://www.liquidsoap.info/blog/2024-02-07-liquidsoap-v2.2.4/ on the problems with crossfades when you have short jingles that might be shorter than the crossfade duration associated with the previous track. And, I've applied the suggestion to tag each track as being a "jingle" or not, and switching to a sequence transition instead of a fade if a jingle is involved. If I don't do that, liquidsoap will eventually crash, which I suppose is the expected behavior.

But, this leads to some dead air as we wait for the track before the jingle to fully fade out and complete before the subsequent jingle starts.

To try and minimize this, I have some logic in the script that generates our playlist to only allow jingles following tracks with a 5 second or less transition at the end (I don't actually fade anything in or out, I just start the next track over the previous one once it starts fading out on its own.) It's not ideal.

Is there really no better way? In a perfect world, I could start a short jingle while the previous track is fading off on its own, and if the jingle ends before the previous track is done, kill the previous track and start the next one right away. Is the problem that we can't load up the next track fast enough in that scenario? If so, maybe we could pre-load it sooner somehow?

As I think things are operating as designed, this is more of a feature request than an issue, which is why I'm bringing it up as a discussion instead.

Thank you for any thoughts.

For more details, here's an example of a jingle transition:

annotate:type="music",liq_cue_in="0.000",liq_cross_start_next="184.100",liq_cross_max_start_duration="184.100",liq_cross_end_duration="4.400",liq_fade_out_delay="4.400",duration="188.500",liq_amplify="-7.94dB":/home/ubuntu/media/The_Offspring/Americana/1/4-Pretty_Fly_For_A_White_Guy_.flac
annotate:artist="Radio Calico",title="Station ID",liq_cue_in=0.0,liq_cross_start_next=5.583151927437642,liq_cross_max_start_duration=5.583151927437642,liq_cross_end_duration=0.0,liq_fade_out_delay=0.0,liq_cross_duration=5.583151927437642,type="jingle",liq_amplify="0.5dB":/home/ubuntu/jingles-proc/Harley-Batsy.wav
annotate:type="music",liq_cue_in="0.000",liq_cross_start_next="187.100",liq_cross_max_start_duration="187.100",liq_cross_end_duration="3.200",liq_fade_out_delay="3.200",duration="190.300",liq_amplify="-9.15dB":/home/ubuntu/media/Good_Charlotte-The_Young_and_The_Hopeless/01-03-Benji_Madden-Lifestyles_of_the_Rich_Famous-SMR.flac

This cross operator does not crash, but leads to dead air:

def simple_crossfade_with_jingles(old, new) =
  if old.metadata["type"] == "jingle" or new.metadata["type"] == "jingle" then
    sequence([old.source, new.source])
  else
        cross.simple(
                old.source,
                new.source,
                fade_in=00.0,
                fade_out=00.0
        )
  end
end

This cross operator will eventually crash:

def custom_crossfade(old, new) =
        cross.simple(
                old.source,
                new.source,
                fade_in=00.0,
                fade_out=00.0
            )
end