Allow different stations to use the same recorders about vesper

[HaroldMills]

Different stations can use the same recorder, just not on the same night. If you use the same recorder at different stations on different nights, you can describe that in your station_devices. If for some reason you move a recorder from one station to another in the same night you'll have to represent it as two different recorders: the Vesper device model can't handle that.

That said, recorders will disappear in an upcoming Vesper version, probably 0.5.0. Having Vesper keep track of recorders and microphones has proven to be more trouble than it seems to me to be worth, so I plan to eliminate recorders and microphones and replace them with something called a sensor, which is just a monaural audio source (e.g. a microphone) at a particular station. Instead of specifying the recorders and microphones used at each station, the dates of their use, and how they were connected, you will just specify the sensors used at each station, with no dates of usage. If you use a particular microphone at multiple stations, you will create a different sensor for it at each one, though you can give the sensors the same name if you wish.

[RichardLitt]

Excited to hear about the switch to sensors - that makes sense to me.

None of these recorders overlapped in nights. Is there something in the way I set it up that caused this error?

[HaroldMills]

From the job log, it looks like the very first station device interval, concerning station "Friendship" device "PC" from midnight on 2021-09-18 to midnight on 2021-09-22, probably overlaps with an existing vesper_station_device archive database row. Is that the case?

[RichardLitt]

I deleted all of the stations in the Admin interface, and then tried 10-15 times to get the metadata to work. The main lack of clarity came from not knowing exactly what syntax to use for

      devices:
          - PC
          - 21c
      connections:
          - output: 21c Output
            input: PC Input 0

I'm unclear how to make this clearer in the docs. I think, given the future switch to sensors, this can probably be closed. Thanks for the tip to check the admin panel.