I see that whilst you can assign a duration to a Break/Dummy event (and the duration is taken into account with the total playlist time), it doesn’t actually include it in auto - ie: it won’t “break for 3 minutes” during a live news insert. I was hoping that it would work like that.
ie:
News Intro
BREAK 3:00 (plays a silent/dummy file or just counts)
News Out
I’d also like to see this - it’d definitely be very useful.
Hi Charlie, have you tried scheduling an event at the top of an hour to play a 3 minute file of silence (as DPS uses, or used too?).
Kind Regards Tony
That’d be a pain for me, in the situation I use mAirList… It’d be much, much easier to do it in airlist itself - what if, for instance, I want a silence of 36 seconds and dont have the time to make a file of that length?
Sorry, playing the breaks/dummys as silence is not possible at the moment. There are plans to implement this, but this involves a number of serious changes in the internal structures of the program, which must be avoided at the moment, as we are approaching the version 2.0 release.
Here’s a suggestion for a workaround: Create a very long file of silence (say, on hour), and set the cue out point to the desired duration. This way, you do not need a separate file for each duration.
Torben
Charlie: I had a little brainwave about this the other day and have only just had time to try it out. Unfortunately, my first idea didn’t work, but my next one did!
Just to check: you want (for example) a break at 05:00:00 and (effectively) Automation to restart at 05:03:00, perhaps with a jingle or ident, yes?
Here’s another workaround, but please note this one will only work if you know the break END time in advance. You also need to create a Script which will start Automation (I’ll come to that later).
For the example above, you would do this:
In Configuration, make sure the option which saves Event Lists in MLPs is switched on.
Insert a BREAK in your Playlist with a fixed time of 05:00:00. (Incidentally, did you know you can use the Artist property of the BREAK item to add a description which displays in the Playlist? Something like:
News feed, restart at 05:03:00
You save this by clicking Local in the Properties dialog, then it will be saved in the MLP. But I digress…)
Continue to add the Playlist items following the BREAK (probably starting with a station ident jingle or whatever).
Add an Event in the Event Scheduler timed at 05:03:00 which runs the ‘restart’ script (code below). Make SURE you tick BOTH of the Scope checkboxes: if not, the Script probably won’t run in Assist mode, which is what you need it to be able to do.
Save the Playlist as an MLP, complete with the Event(s).
When this Playlist is run, the timed BREAK will stop Automation at news time, and the Event will restart it at ‘end of news’ time (this is why you need to know the break end time in advance). I have tried this and it all works, but please let me know if it isn’t suitable.
Oh… the script? 
It could hardly be simpler: a four-liner. Copy and save this code into a sensibly-named (and located) MLS file:
begin
PlaybackControl(0).SetAutomation(true);
PlaybackControl(0).AutomationNext;
end.I named my copy Start-Automation-Playlist-1.mls and saved it in the scripts folder under my mAirList program folder.
The 0 in both lines refers to Playlist 1, which you can change if you need to. In effect, what you’re doing is creating a ‘command’ you can schedule, which ensures AUTO is on and then ‘clicks PLAY.’
BFN
CAD
Cad,
Thanks for that explanation - It had sort of occurred to me that a script was the likely answer. I’ll give that a try later on.
The descriptions of Breaks/Commands/Dummys is very useful, and they can also be scheduled in M3U via StationPlaylist