RadioDJ Stops Playing Music Randomly ****SOLVED*** (I think)

[spliff99fm]

So I have read through a number of topics here where this issue, RadioDJ Stops Playing Music Randomly, has been discussed. I have tried a number of suggestions to try to isolate the issue - to no avail.

I am brand new to all of this and I have been researching as I go.  I run RadioDJ predominantly on AutoDJ, almost 24/7 while I continue to develop a brand strategy, marketing strategy, programming strategy and overall station format prior to my hard launch. 

Sometimes I spend the evening fiddling around in RadioDJ, updating settings, configuring new equipment, uploading new tracks or updating existing tracks; and other times, I don't touch RadioDJ at all and just let it do its thing in the background while I am researching how to edit audio, audio processing tasks, sourcing new music, recording voice tracks, etc.  When I am working on anything on my computer I do not have the issue of RDJ randomly stopping.  It normally happens while I am asleep or at my "REAL" job (the one that pays the bills).  When it happens, it may be a number of hours before I realize it and restart the program. Since I work on the computer at totally random times and for different lengths of time, it has been hard for me to pull together any patterns that would help me to determine what is causing this thorn in my side.
 
Since I started this new obsession of mine called internet radio about 2 months ago, I have come across a number of great videos that have taught me quite a bit. Most notably for me are the videos by @jmac Jeff - The RadioDJ Dude, and Roderick Carter both of which have amazingly informative YouTube channels. Big shout out to the both of them for being my secret mentors as I try to navigate this whole new world I have found myself in.

One of the videos I recently stumbled upon from Jeff talked about a solution for ending Dead Air, once and for all.  In the video he talked about a free software that will alert you any time it detects dead air for a user defined period of time.  It will then kick off a number of tasks, which for me is email me, text me, shut down RDJ and restart RDJ. I figured if I can't figure out what is causing the issue, I can at least figure out an automated way to get RDJ back on its track to mitigate the dead air. 

Today is the first full day this new software has been running.  The information I have learned from today's dead air events may hold the golden ticket to solving the root issue once and for all.....  I learned that while my computer is unattended, RDJ stopped playing every hour and 10 mins, almost precisely, based on the timing of the emails and texts I have received throughout the day. This suggests to me that there is a task that runs at these same intervals that is causing RDJ to stop playing.

Since RDJ is not freezing or going unresponsive during these events I was able to rule out that RDJ was the root cause.  Next, I have already adjusted Power Management settings on my computer to never hibernate and never sleep. So as far as I can tell, this is not the root cause. Since I run the device that RDJ runs on continuously for 24 hours, I have set up a daily automatic system reboot in the wee hours of the night and configured all the necessary software needed to run and support RDJ to automatically fire up at start up.

This got me to thinking.  I store my entire music library on an external hard drive to support the storage needs for my library. There has to be some type of failure that is happening every hour and 10 mins when RDJ is trying to retrieve a track from the drive.  So off to the Googletron I went and searched for "Do external hard drives go into sleep mode after being idle for a period of time?" and there was my answer.  After a few clicks in the device manager I am optimistically hopeful that my issue is now solved.

STEPS I TOOK
I searched Device Manager in the start menu
Expanded Universal Serial Bus Controllers
Right clicked and called up the properties for my hard drive
Went to power management and deselected "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power."

While I hope this has solved this issue, I hope I have not created a new issue by way of my hard drive working continuously for all of eternity.  We shall see...

Chime in if you can think of, or are aware of any issues with this setting being deselected.

Note: I tried to tag Jmac here(not sure if it works) and I am not sure if Mr. Carter is in this forum. If he is tag him so he knows knows he's one of my official secret mentors.lol