Cartwall Commands + Other Ideas

Charlie_Davy · August 27, 2006, 11:23pm

Just had a thought whilst staring at the Cartwall (sad, I know)…

How about the ability to put commands on the cartwall buttons as well as audio… This would allow you to recall your most commonly-used command-cuts.
Perhaps the Cartwall could allow buttons to be dropped into the playlist, too ?
Looking at the well-hidden event-scheduler - I’m trying to see how best to implement a way of keeping the playlist log to time (ie: it plays the right hour at the right time etc), and having read Torben’s idea of using the script function to determine the current day/time/hour - I think a “jump to position” option in this scheduler would also be ideal…

Here’s how: In our playlister, we can schedule an “Hour Marker”, such as “Start Of Hour 14:00” - Using the event scheduler, we could then force mAirList to “jump” to the next “Start Of Hour” text in the playlist at a given time every hour (usually 2mins early to allow for the current song to finish just past the hour.

This means that the usual practice of over-scheduling your hour by 2-3 songs won’t throw the timing out during automation. For example, I left mine running overnight and at 9:30am it was playing the song scheduled for 8:15 If mAirList could jump to the next hour point in the playlist (which is 1 playlist per day, loaded at midnight) - it would keep playout on-time and accurate to within a couple of minutes.

That should keep Torben away from the wine for a while !

Finally, I’ve left my 2 systems running - with scheduled command-cuts on both machines. Main playout is pausing and firing the split-breaks every 15mins, and then returning to the playout afterwards… So far - 3hrs in - it’s still working. Says a lot for my scheduling(!) and even more so for the software… Hopefully it’ll still be chugging-away at 9am tomorrow morning.

I’m using StationPlaylist Creator - and if anybody (Tony?) needs some help with the settings, just give me a shout.

tony_wilding · August 28, 2006, 8:33am

Morning Charlie, I may just invest in a copy of SP Creator for home,as you guessed we are using this and SP Studio in our studio.

Jumping to time very much Audioenhance DPS/SP Studio and another good idea for automation.

In the main my use of mAirList will be pushing it into use in other stations, actually running a demo evening this coming Thursday.

Any ideas gratefully received.

To keep hour to time in playlists try using a template with a timed command cut at the end to fade/studio audio before a command loads the next playlist template (as DJ serv).

Unfortunately you would not be able to use SPC for this, hence the request earlier for rotate commands.

Kind regards Tony

tony_wilding · August 28, 2006, 2:13pm

Just tried to save tags via the cartwall. Unfortunately that does not work as obviously the audio is loaded into a player.

Just a heads up to save anyone else trying this.

Found that event scheduler too. Its in automation mode labelled E.

Standard commands and its own forthcoming script language too.

stuck for muting the line in then go to http://www.mixtime.com/

little app in the user add on called line in.

tony_wilding · August 28, 2006, 9:59pm

Charlie, if you are using SPC to generate hourly playlists would it be possible to use the event scheduler to reload each hours playlist.

I have achieved similar using mairlist mlp files. Hand scheduling a playlist and assuming I have filled an hour saving as 00.mlp etc 01.mlp representing each hour. easier if you could build a template using rotating cuts from a directory (rot files).

The event scheduler is set to stop playout at 1 second to the hour before loading and playing the next playlist (2 separate commands, as I have no idea yet how to use the scripting).

Charlie_Davy · August 29, 2006, 11:12am

The playlists issue is going to take some thinking… Most systems use a “day” playlist, which I think is the better option - although as you know, SPL Studio uses one playlist for each “hour”… This is handy if you regularly make many changes to the log. The downside of “hour” playlists are that you’ll need to load them more often, and work out a way of doing it.

My 2 proposals (for mAirList) are these:

Add a “jump to” feature within the Event Scheduler - This will allow the playlist position to move to the next hour on a “day” playlist. As long as hour-markers are placed at the start of each hour (most schedulers can do this), it’ll work fine. These markers will most likely appear as a “dummy” as far as mAirList is concerned.
Add a simple “current time” scripting option for loading a playlist. Something like .playlistLoad $dd-$mm-$hh.m3u (day-month-hour)- With an option for it to “add an hour” to the equation, because you may wish to load the NEXT hour a few minutes early.

Example: At 09:55, the system loads the current “hour” playlist - But has the “add hour” option set, so instead of loading the 9am hour (as the system clock is still in the 9am hour), it loads the 10am hour ready for playout after the current item.

Torben - This is what’s called a “polite time marker”… It gets the system ready for playing the next item/playlist AFTER the current item has finished… and “exact time markers” wait until the set time, then execute the command instantly, regardless of what’s playing.

Torben · August 29, 2006, 3:27pm

In general, I can see two approaches to such automation challenges.

We establish a “mAirList standard” for playlist filenames etc., and I write some hard-wired functions that load and play these playlists at a given time.
Use mAirListScript. This might be a little more work, but it allows full customization. And, given a powerful set of functions, mAirListScript can perform any job you like.

I give some examples, some of which use functions and interfaces that I have just implemented today, and which will be available as of version 1.5.21.

Scenario #1: Hourly playlists. Say, they are named yyyy-mm-dd-hh.m3u, and saved in the folder c:\playlists. Using the time routines imported from Delphi, you can easily determine the name of next hour’s playlist and append it to the current playlist:

begin CurrentPlaylist.Append('c:\playlists\' + FormatDateTime('yyyy-mm-dd-hh', now + 0.04166) + '.m3u'); end.

Wonder what this strange number is? Delphi saves dates and times as a floating point number, one day corresponding to the interval 1, and hours and minutes being fractions thereof. 0.04166 is 1/24, one hour. So I just add one hour to the current date and time, and use FormatDateTime to generate the file name. The minutes don’t matter. This script can run at any time during the previous hour, perhaps 5 minutes prior to the top.

Say, your m3u files start with a dummy element titled “TOP OF THE HOUR”. Then the current situation looks like this:

SONG (playing)
SONG
SONG
…
TOP OF THE HOUR
SONG
SONG
SONG

where the first three songs are the remaining items from the previous hour.

Then you add a second event, which will run at each hour exactly at xx:00:00. This script will first identify the next TOP OF THE HOUR item in the playlist and then use the new AutomationJump command (thank you, Charlie) to jump to that item:

[code]var i: integer;

begin
for i := CurrentPlaylist.GetHistoryCount to CurrentPlaylist.GetCount - 1 do
if CurrentPlaylist.GetItem(i).GetTitle = ‘TOP OF THE HOUR’ then begin
CurrentPlaylist.AutomationJump(CurrentPlaylist.GetItem(i));
break;
end;
end.[/code]

GetHistoryCount is the number of “history” items at the beginning of the playlist, those who have already been played but haven’t been moved to the repository yet, usually 0, unless activated this feature in the config.

Voila!

Scenario #2: Daily playlists. Even easier now. Just use the second script to jump to the TOP OF THE HOUR item each hour.

Torben

Charlie_Davy · August 29, 2006, 3:55pm

Torben,
That all sounds fine, and I look forward to trying this in .21

I will just make one comment about a daily playlist - They appear to slow mAirList down quite a bit. Perhaps becuase, in my case, I have quite a few break-notes and commands… I assume mAirList has to calculate all the outro points and spot missing files (if any)…

Torben · August 29, 2006, 7:55pm

1.5.21 is now out. Of course, I’m much to busy to write a documentation on all these functions and interfaces But the examples above should be a good starting point. There are some more in this thread: http://forum.mairlist.de/viewtopic.php?t=465

Happy testing,

Torben

tony_wilding · August 29, 2006, 8:43pm

Thanks for the latest update Torben, where do you find the time.
Today I prepared and have just revised some config guides ready for a demo evening on Thursday.