Scheduling of announcements during Network play

[mbabb]

I'm looking for idea's on how to do the following: My Network has two :60sec breaks each hour where I can break away from the Network and play a local :60sec announcement. If I don't break away, the Network just fills the :60 with their announcements. So these breaks are not mandatory. Since the Network sends a DTMF tone to automate the start of the :60sec local announcement, I would like to utilize that tone. I've created a "Track List" and scheduled it as an event to play one track, with overlay, whenever the DTMF tone is received. No problem. It works great. However, my local announcements get very repetitive because, at this moment, there are only two that are randomly rotated, so listeners are hearing them EVERY hour 24/7. I don't want to add a bunch of other announcements/PSA's to eliminate the repetitiveness. I would like some way to have RB to randomly play these local announcements or ignore the DTMF and stay with the Network.

In the past, before the latest RB version, I used to schedule several "comments" in my track list along with the local announcements and that worked fine. Whenever RB randomly picked the comment, it just printed in the log the comment (which was "No local Announcement) and the network kept playing. When RB randomly picked the local announcement, RB would lower the network volume to 0 (Overlay) and play the local announcement then bring the Network volume back up. It worked great, then a new RB version came along and it still worked but printed "error, unable to play" in the log. Which I could deal with because what I was trying to do still worked. Then an update came and now, the "comment" is skipped altogether in the Track List and only the actual announcements play covering every Network :60 local break.

Maybe some command, etc... can be added as a new feature that will allow RB to treat the comment or command as a track and execute randomly with the local announcements in the Track List without interrupting network audio when it executes. Maybe there is something already? Idea's?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[djsoft]

Maybe some command, etc... can be added as a new feature that will allow RB to treat the comment or command as a track and execute randomly with the local announcements in the Track List without interrupting network audio when it executes. Maybe there is something already? Idea's?

Probably adding an empty (zero duration) audio file will do?

 

[mbabb]

Tried that. With a zero duration audio file, RB prints "[A] error: Unable to play! Error code 41 (unsupported file format)", but if you add at least a tenth of a second of silence in that file, RB will not print the error message.

However, whether the audio file has a zero duration or has a tenth of a second of silence the outcome is the same. There is about 1.5 seconds of no audio, due to the "Overlay". That's how long it takes to fade Network audio to zero and then return it to 100%.

I guess I will have to live with that, until some other way comes along. Thanks for responding.

 

[djsoft]

However, whether the audio file has a zero duration or has a tenth of a second of silence the outcome is the same. There is about 1.5 seconds of no audio, due to the "Overlay". That's how long it takes to fade Network audio to zero and then return it to 100%.

Yes. Currently I can't think of any solution to prevent that, except for disabling fades for overlay events - but this will affect all events and that may not be what you need.

 

[HMMMM]

Mbab, try creating a file in audacity that is this same length duration but with no sound content. I e a 60s sounclip