Options for scheduling advertisements in RadioBOSS

R

radiodungog

Member
Hello,

We celebrated 1000 hours of continuous broadcasting last week with RadioBOSS and we are very happy with it's reliability.

Now we need to schedule some advertisements.  What options do we have to do that ?

We have been using auto-generation of music playlists for station content and we are keen to do something similar with the advertisements so we don't have to hand schedule them one by one.  Is that possible and if so how would you recommend we do it ?


Thanks, Jamie C.
 
I'm afraid the best way to schedule advertisements is to add the one-by-one to scheduler. You may also use the "Repeat every ... minutes" feature to easy the process.
 
Dmitry,

Hmm, what a shame.  The instruction manual PDF doesn't give adequate details of how to do this.  Can you direct me to a URL with more info ?

Thanks, Jamie C.
 
Dmitry and RBS,

I cannot find any material that describes how commercials (advertisements) are scheduled.  I understand that it is done on a time basis so that the commercials happen at a preset time of the day.  Apart from that I don't know what we have to do to schedule them.

Can you please explain the process ?  We would like our commercial breaks to be at 20 minutes past the hour, 40 minutes past the hour and just before the top of the hour.  As a community radio station we are allowed a maximum of 5 minutes of sponsor messages per hour - but this might work out to be 90 seconds per bracket times three brackets per hour.

We expect to have about 50 sponsors with short messages of 15 seconds each.

Assuming we allocate 4.5 minutes per hour of sponsor messages to keep on the conservative side of the rules the maths would be:

50 * 15 seconds (0.25 minutes) = 12.5 minutes for a full rotation of all sponsors if played once and in sequence

12.5 minutes / 4.5 minutes per hour = 3 hours per rotation, hence 8 rotations per day

Because all sponsors contribute an equal amount of sponsorship money each month we would like them all to get the same number of sponsor messages per month so that there is no ill feeling AND so we don't have to manually count the number that went to air.

Does that make sense ?


Thanks, Jamie C.
 
I'm sorry for a delay.
In your situation, I'm afraid RadioBOSS currently doesn't provide feature to distribute tracks in the way you need...
Good news, soon a program for this will be created, in July I think.
 
Hello,

  I had to face the same kind of isssue. I use the playlist generator pro to create a playlist of ads Ads are eslected randomly from a dedicated folder. Unfortunatly, there is no way to ensure each ad is beeing played exact same number of time. I use a task to generate the ADs list and to insert it at regular time.
  Another solution I also use for the auto promotions, is still use the playlist generator pro. I use the playlist gen pro to create music playlist from specific template, in the template I insert every 3 musical tracks a promo also taken from a specific folder. But there is no way to predict at what time it will be broadcasted.

Regards
Christian
 
Hi there.

You got me thinking, and I tried two options, which both worked. It depends on how you run your station.

To do these, of course you need to create a whole lot of short playlists. I created 10 playlists of 3 x 30 second ads each. (90 sec breaks). I labeled them ADS 1.m3u...up to...ADS 10.m3u. I specifically chose which ads would go in each ad break.

(1) The manual method. Create one hour playlists of music, and manually insert the AD playlists in numerical order, at the places that you want.

(2)  The automatic method. Use the scheduler to insert AD playlists at particular times during the day. ie: schedule ADS 1.m3u to play at 8:20. Schedule ADS 2.m3u to play at 8:40...etc. The key is to make sure you leave unchecked "Remove previous schedule from playlist" and check "If there are tracks in the playlist enqueue"

Hope this makes sense. All the best.

Dmitry, you have me intrigued! What is this new development you are working on? :)

have a great day all...and greetings from New Zealand.
 
It's a program to generate playlists automatically using some info about tracks (commercials), like: how much each track should be played, what days, how many times a day, etc...
In result it will create several playlists and scheduler tasks which will be imported in RadioBOSS.
 
Dmitry, Christian, James,

I'm reading this from my phone with some difficulty.  I wiil read this post again tomorrow from my PC.  But, the Playlist Generator has an advertisement add feature in step 5 or step 6.  It allows you to add several advert playlists one after the other down a list, but I think it requires a time in the playlist file name.  Can anyone give some examples of how this is done ?

Thanks, Jamie C
 
Yes, playlists should be named like "13.00.m3u"... But I'd not recommend using this. The feature was added many years ago, when scheduler was not working yet. For now best way to play ads is to schedule them.
 
James,

I like the short playlist idea with the 3 x ads in each one.  I think that might work.  For us we would probably do our 3 or 4  x 15 second ads.  In fact, we might be able to insert those in the Jingles section and play in order.  The only problem being that the ads break would be every 4 songs and hence a variable time frame rather than being on time at the same time each hour.

If things like top of the hour news, bottom of the hour news headlines and ads are regular events then they should be scheduled.  We are using the scheduler for the news and news headlines but that is a very easy and simple playlist to create because it is standard.

Top of hour news:
1. News intro (15-20 seconds)
2. New and sport (4.5 minutes)
3. Sponsor message from business that pays for our news (30 seconds)

Bottom of the hour news headlines:
1. News intro (15-20 seconds)
2. New and sport (1.5 minutes)

For the adverts it probably warrants a special way of doing it.  I'm not sure how other people handle adverts but it's almost like we need a special playlist to store them and then a special way of scheduling them.  But for us in a community radio station the secret is to keep it simple, don't use any manpower to schedule them and keep the billing dead simple.  By eliminating manpower we keep our costs to zero and can pass those benefits on to everyone in our small community.  Our coverage area has a population of about 8,000 people - pretty small.

Our sponsorship rates are:  $30 per month, or $300 per year for local businesses

With 15 second sponsor messages (ads) we can comfortably handle 50 sponsors and give them a good repeat ratio so they are heard regularly.  Legally we can only have a maximum of 5 minutes per hour of sponsor messages.  And with the $1500 per month income ($1250 per month if at the annual rate) we can pay our bills and survive AND provide a good service to the community.



Dimitry,

Okay on playlist name with time embedded.  I remember seeing that somewhere before.

When do the adverts play from step 6 in the Playlist Generator ?  Do they use that timed playlist name format ?


Thanks, Jamie C.
 
radiodungog, it generates the playlist with ADs inserted at certain points. On Step 1 you specify the playlist "start time" - it's the time when playlist is supposed to be played.
Based on this time it inserts ads...
 
Dmitry,

Okay, Step 6 sounds good ... we'll give it a go.

So if in Step 1 we specify the start time to be the time the Playlist is generated - say 6am.

Then in Step 6 we throw in some ADs in groups of 4 x 15 seconds adverts in mini playlists like James and Christian mentioned - so each playlist shown below is a playlist of 4 x 15 second adverts:

06.00.m3u
06.15.m3u
06.30.m3u
06.45.m3u
07.00.m3u
07.15.m3u
07.30.m3u
07.45.m3u
08.00.m3u
08.15.m3u
08.30.m3u
08.45.m3u

Does this sound sensible ?

Jamie C.
 
Yes, it should work.
But I'd not recommend using it... Scheduler is much better way to play ads.
 
Dmitry,

But if we need to schedule mini-playlists of 4 x 15 second ads every 15 minutes of the day then using the scheduler we would end up with:

24 x 4 = 96 scheduler entries for a single day, or 2,880 per month

That is unmanageable

Jamie C.
 
Hello,

I agree. It's manageable only if you use some kind of software to do it automatically...
There are several ways to get this software:
- google for it, maybe there's something exists which can do it
- wait until we create such kind of software
- pay some money to developers to create it for you (we can do it - sales@djsoft.net).
 
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