Playlist Backup - Accidental Deletion of Important Playlists

[radiodungog]

Hello,

At our community radio station we use master playlists to store the music we want to play - hand selected  by our presenters.  Typically the music tracks selected and chosen to suit specific programs that go to air - programmes like:

Easy Listening
Country Music
Classic Rock
Country Rock

We do all of this on RadioBOSS and from time to time we accidentally overwrite an existing playlist with "zero" content - yes, empty contents.

This is a BIG problem for us because as you might appreaciate it takes a LONG time to assemble a master playlist of 3,000 easy listening songs or 2,000 country songs - and our volunteer resources are very limited.

I know you'll be thinking "why don't you back them up ?" - well yes, we should, and I have just done that now - but has anyone else had this problem and solved it in a simple manner ?


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

I know you'll be thinking "why don't you back them up ?" - well yes, we should, and I have just done that now - but has anyone else had this problem and solved it in a simple manner ?

That's the exact solution I wanted to offer while reading your post. Backup is a must have thing for important data.

To help on your problem. How does it happen that playlist got overwritten with an empty one? Maybe there's a way to prevent this.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Besides doing daily backups as an insurance policy against losing important files I have found another contributing factor to our problem.  We store all our material on a NAS (Network Access Server sitting on our LAN).

If all of that material was stored locally on the PC HDD we wouldn't have as bad a situation because any deleted files or folders would be stored in the Recycle Bin.

Because we use a NAS any files or folders that are deleted are simply deleted and are not stored in the PC Recycle Bin.

That is a BIG disadvantage.  Our NAS has 6TB worth of storage and we are currently using about 2TB - so we have heaps of spare capacity and having a Recycle Bin on the NAS would be very useful.


Thanks, Jamie C

 

[djsoft]

Lack of Recycle Bin on NAS storage is the additional reason to do regualr backups. There are lots of solutions to perform scheduled backups.
You can even use RB Scheduler to run a .bat file to backup the most important things

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

I think I have found the trouble.  On March 20 I created two large and important playlists for a country music show - one as an interim playlist to check the contents then another as the final version.  On that night at about 7:30pm I opened the final version in a spare playlist tab to check it was okay, then copied and pasted it to the active playlist tab for broadcast.

Today I looked at both playlists - the interim one and the final one - an the interim one was still date-stamped March 20 with a reasonable filesize, and the final one was date-stamped March 28 with a filesize of 3k.  Upon checking on the final one it was empty - so it had been overwritten with no content 8 days after it was created.

We suspect the following:
1. The final version was sitting in a spare playlist tab for 8 days untouched
2. Someone wanted the tab to do some other work, so they deleted the contents (Ctrl A delete) to clear the contents
3. We don't know if they saved it or didn't save it, or rebooted RadioBOSS or what happened but the date-stamp was March 28 at 3pm in the afternoon

So ... the problem here might be that an open playlist is at risk of having it's contents changed or deleted then saved with no contents in it.

I discussed this with our other technical person and his suggestion was that any time we save something in RadioBOSS it would be good if we were prompted for a password.

I'm sure this is the nature of our problems now and for many instances in the past where we have found "empty" playlists.


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Yes, it remembers the last playlist file name used for each tab, even after RB was restarted. I don't recall why it's doing so, but there was a reason.

It could be an issue: if no one used "New playlist" command (as you said, they use Select All/Delete instead) it will be saved with the latest file name...

Password protection is planned for RB 5.0 by the way.

For now, make sure important playlists have backup copies, and probably you should tell everyone to use New playlist button to create a new playlist.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

How do we get out of a playlist ?  Or in other words if we open a playlist in a tab, view it or make some changes, amd save it, how do we "get out" so there is no possibility of corrupting it ?

Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Dmitry,

How do we get out of a playlist ?  Or in other words if we open a playlist in a tab, view it or make some changes, amd save it, how do we "get out" so there is no possibility of corrupting it ?

Thanks, Jamie C.

Click "New" to create a new playlist. This will reset the file name.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Hmmm, I'm not sure we can get presenters to remember that, but when you bring out the mod to include a password when saving stuff this will fix the problem permanently.


Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Yes, the password should help. But even with passwords backups are must-have. Having a single copy of important information is too risky. It can disappear any time for various reasons...

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

We have lost another playlist due to overwriting of the file.  Backing up to a common folder isn't going to be much help if a blank playlist is saved.  Another thought, can a playlist be saved and have the write protect tag feature enabled ?

There is no piece of software that I have ever used that didn't prompt me we a "are you sure ..." before overwriting an existing file.  Hence I am unsure how to solve this problem.

Any suggestions ?


Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Another thought, can a playlist be saved and have the write protect tag feature enabled ?

Yes. Right-click on a file, select Properties, tick "Read-Only" and click OK.

There is no piece of software that I have ever used that didn't prompt me we a "are you sure ..." before overwriting an existing file.

Standard behavior is to save without questions when "Save" command is used and ask "Do you want overwrite..." when "Save As..." is used. RadioBOSS behaves like this, and any other software I know like Photoshop, MS Word, etc. work like this too.

The problem is that RB remembers playlist file names for each tab. I'll think how this can be changed.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Great.  Last night I was in the car at 9pm so I pulled over to the side of the road and sent a message to our other tech guy with the "Read-only" suggestion.  He claimed it didn't work but I described the box as "Write-protect".  Anyway obviously it does work very well because I just tried it here.

So for us the perfect solution to solve the problem NOW is to change all our manually created playlist files as "Read-only" - even to the extent that if someone saves a playlist via RB it follows that rule.

Then when the presenters cannot save it as the original name their only option is to save it as another name - which is good - or ring the tech guy and ask "why is this happening" and he can tell them and put them straight.

This is actually a good solution - with perhaps a password over-ride in a future update with RB.


Thanks Dmitry, I think you have resolved this obscure problem,  Jamie C. 

 

[djsoft]

Yes, the Read-Only attribute prevents playlist to be overwritten from RB, but it doesn't prevent it to be deleted using Windows Explorer. Well, if someone deletes important files that's a diversion

To protect file from being deleted, you can use security attributes (file Properties->Security) - allow only certain Window users to modify file while other users can only read it.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Okay ... we don't seem to have any problems with people deleting playlists on purpose - it seems more like they are viewing them with RB and don't understand the impact of clearing the screen or modifying the contents of the screen.  Both of these actions could be overcome if RB saved every playlist as a "Read only" file ... then if it had to be modified by someone then the technical guy could untick the "Read only" tag and fix it properly.  But the main problem we see is the presenters, the tech guys and all of us in fact just not fully understanding how RB deal with this.

Yep, the "Read only" tag is an excellent solution for now ... and backups too of course ... but the best fix is to nip it in the bud and apply "Read only" tags immediately.


Thanks again,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

If we do so, the support will be flooded with the requests like "I saved my playlist, but when I save it again after making changes it shows an error message and doesn't save anything!". So, I'm afraid this feature can not be added.

Please tell me more about playlist "life cycle":
- who creates a playlist, when, where it is saved
- who use those playlists, when and how
- any other information

This will help to understand your situation better and some modifications in RB could be made to improve user experience.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Yep, I understand about the flood of support requests.

Playlist lifecycle:

1. We as a group create the playlists manually by looking at our large music library and selecting the ones we think are suitable - also aided by music chart books.  They tend to be master playlists with carefully selected tracks that match music styles like: Easy, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, Classic Rock, Country .... and so on.  They are sorted in a folder on the NAS ... \Playlists\

2. RB Playlist Generator Pro accesses them, and presenters may pull them up in a spare tab to find some popular tracks to add to their live program to jazz it up a bit.  When they do this they pre-listen to the track of interest and then copy and paste it to the main RB tab that is on air.

3. These master playlists represent the pick of all songs suitable to play from our large music library.  They are intended to last forever and anything we play on air comes from them.  In essence they are our "approved to play" list.


That's about the best story ....


Thanks,  Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

OK. In your situation the easiest solution is as said above - use the "Read Only" attribute.

Another one, better but a bit harder to setup would be create different users in Windows and assign security permissions for files (or folders), so some users can only read those files, while others (password protected users) have full access. This way you protect files to be modified from within RadioBOSS and also they won't be deleted or modified using other software.