A full week of Programs

[radiodungog]

Hello,

Last Friday we loaded a full week of scheduled programs on RadioBOSS.  For simplicity sake I will outline a typical day of the Monday to Friday schedule.


Schedule 23:59:50 All Days, generate Auto-Easy-370 (Easy Listening 370 minutes), Remove previous schedule from the playlist, Clear playlist

Schedule 05:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Early-Rock-60 (Early Rock 60 minutes)

Schedule 06:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro + news + news sponsor message), all news broadcasts are scheduled with the one entry but have been reproduced here and below to show that repetition)

Schedule 06:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Easy-670 (Easy Listening 670 minutes, music is over-provisioned to avoid running short)

Schedule 07:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 08:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 09:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 10:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 11:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 12:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 13:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 14:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 15:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 16:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)
Schedule 17:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)

Schedule 17:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Pop-60 (Pop 60 minutes)

Schedule 18:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)

Schedule 18:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Early-Rock 60 (Early Rock 60 minutes)

Schedule 19:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)

Schedule 19:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Motown-Magic-60 (Motown Magic 60 minutes)

Schedule 20:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)

Schedule 20:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Frogs-Country-60 (Frogs Country 60 minutes)

Schedule 21:00:00 Mon-Fri, w:\playlist\news.m3u (news intro, news, news sponsor message)

Schedule 21:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Oz-Rock-60 (Oz Rock 60 minutes)

Schedule 22:59:50 Mon-Fri, generate Auto-Classic-Rock-60 (Classic Rock 60 minutes)

REPEAT


From the above scheduling procedure the following is achieved:

1. Schedule 23:59:50 is used to remove excess music before the start of a new day
2. All programs are inserted into residual playlist at 10 seconds before the hour
3. News is inserted into residual playlist on the hour (after the next hour program has been inserted)
4. We over-provision music by about 5-10 minutes per program to make sure we don't run out of music
5. By using the insert process we end up pushing all the excess music to the end of the day and then the Schedule 23:59:50 setting is used to remove excess music before the start of a new day

Is the process shown above the best way to do it ?  If not, what would you suggest ?

We tried to delete the unplayed music at the start of each program but found that the news was inserted ahead of the new program and not played.  Is there any simple way around this ?


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

The setup looks fine.
To make the news be inserted after music, you should check the "If there are tracks from schedule in the playlist, enqueue" option.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

We designed the above process to do the following:

1. Run programmes that start on the hour (some an hour long, some longer), using Playlist Generator to auto-generate music to fill those time slots with some extra tracks to prevent dead air time
2. Add news broadcasts to slot in as close to the hour as possible while waiting for the previous song to finish

If we use the option "If there are tracks from schedule in the playlist, enqueue" don't we end up with a heap of news bulletins stacked up at the end of all the music ?

For short programs of 1 hour duration the auto-generation works well.

For longer programs of 6 hours or 12 hours it is much better to auto-generate once and not every hour because of the likelihood of music repeats.  We tried the re-generate every hour option and received many customer complaints about the repeats.

Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

The latest (4.5.4) version has a new feature "Do not remove tracks fro the playlist after playing". Side effect of this option is:
- tracks inserted by this event won't be marked with the "clock" icon. Instead, tracks will appear like regular tracks.
- the "If there are tracks from schedule in the playlist, enqueue" option won't consider those tracks as scheduler tracks, so news will be inserted after currently playing tracks, and not after latest track in playlist.

Yes, I know it's not obvious at all...

Also I'd recommend to run some tests before going live if you consider to use these options