Help Understanding Automation and Scheduling

I have read a lot of the stuff on setting up mairlist in the wiki. And it says to plan out exactly what your station needs before you start playing with ini files. So I started researching.

I’ve been looking around at layouts of other automation programs, as well as a few layouts I could find on this forum. And problem is this - I don’t know what the needs of my station are!!! I am really too amateur to know where to start. ???

I am running a radio station at a summer camp for 5 days. In previous years we have just used itunes/winamp and DJ hardware. We also have mixers and microphones. Often times the presenters become overly distracted with managing transitions rather than having entertaining dialogue.

So this year the plan is to have only a 100 or so songs on a rotation. I would like some songs to be played a little more often and some a little less. And I would also like to be able to add songs on the fly that are not in that list for requests and such. In between songs there should be a random sweeper, and every so often there should be a clump of randomly chosen adverts. So all the presenters need to do is pause the show and start talking, then unpause and the cycle continues.

So maybe some of you radio pros can tell me: AM I ON THE RIGHT TRACK?!?! Is what I am hoping for realistic? Can mairlist do what I need? What kind of layout will best suit me? Does anyone have the ini for such a layout?

Thanks for reading and any help is appreciated.

Most of what you’re asking is about scheduling, not layouts.

Therefore the answer depends on which edition of mAirList you are using. If you have the Personal or Professional version of mAirList, then some of what you’re asking could be achieved using the database (if you have the Community edition, the database isn’t available).

However, the scheduling provided by the mAirList database is fairly basic: if you have detailed scheduling requirements—and it sounds to me like you do—then I’d suggest you use a separate scheduling program to prepare your playlists in advance, then load those into mAirList as required.

If you’re on a budget, the program I’d recommend would be the Lite edition of Station Playlist Creator (http://www.stationplaylist.com/creator.html), which costs a measly €29. I don’t think you would need either of the more expensive versions.

BFN
CAD

What kind of compromises would I be talking about to actually just use Mairlist? Perhaps you can explain more in layman’s terms what Mairlist actually does, because I think I’ve missed it. I know this kind of content is available, but it is targeted toward people who have more experience than me.

I currently have the 14 day trial of personal version. I am anticipating buying it so have started trying to configure it for my usage. But I will probably wait till the end of my trial before buying to be extra sure it meets my needs.

I am pretty open to not doing everything I have said above. Out of interest what would you recommend as an introduction to automation and scheduling. Say, I decide to make what I said in my first post the plan for 3 camps from now, but for now I just make an incremental change that will help a lot and step in the right direction. What would you do first, second third?

Thanks

mAirList is a playout system which is designed to interface well to sound cards and mixers, and to other external controllers. It is highly configurable, so if you want three or four ‘mini-playlists’ each feeding a single Player (like Dalet), no problem; if you want to completely change the layout and colours, fonts, etc., no problem; if you want to produce not only your standard logging file for reporting the tracks you play to your country’s music licensing bodies, but also a separate ‘now playing’ log file to feed a Web page, no problem; if you want to automatically load pre-prepared playlists every hour, no problem; if you want to use scripts (think of these like macros in Word or Excel) to perform tasks or add features which mAirList does not already possess, no problem.

What mAirList is not really designed to do is the actual music scheduling. And by 'music scheduling, ’ I mean the advance preparation of lists of songs (typically in units of one hour) which obey certain scheduling ‘rules’ you have decided upon—like adding a random sweeper (or a bunch of ads.) after every so many songs. If you want to automate the ‘random’ selection of ‘types of tunes,’ ads., etc. in a specific order, then mAirList is not really designed to do that. Yes, there is a ‘mini-scheduler’ built into the database, but Torben would be the first to take pains to point out that this is not intended to be anything more than a very simplistic way of ‘randomly’ selecting tracks. It does not do dayparting (for example, don’t play any songs with swearing from say 0700-2100 on any day); it does not do artist separation (don’t play tracks by the same artist within—say—two hours of each other); it does not, in short, do any of the more sophisticated scheduling which you would expect of any decent music scheduling software (like RCS Selector, Music 1, or even Station Playlist Creator as mentioned above).

mAirList is definitely the best and certainly the most configurable radio playout software this side of £500 and is considerably better and much less limiting than some of the systems which cost several thousands of pounds. But as I say, it’s not a music scheduler! This is not uncommon in radio: it’s usual for the playout system to be separate from the scheduling system, and often they are from different manufacturers.

As to what to do first, I would suggest that you start by looking through all the configuration options, and decide which options you want to use, and which ones you don’t. How many playlists do you want? How many Players? Do you want a large overlay countdown to the Ramps of songs? Do you want a single progress bar which reflects only the item currently playing, or a separate progress bar in each Player? Do you want to add a screen object showing the time left to the top of the hour? Those are the sorts of questions you should know the answers to before you start to make more drastic changes like changing the design of the layout.

Second, let’s consider your mixer. If this is a broadcast mixer (as opposed to the the kind of mixer which a band would use for its PA, or a ‘mixing’ DJ would use), it will have a number of stereo input channels. Once you’ve figured out how many ‘main Players’ you want (we’ll come back to the Cartwall later), you would usually ‘route’ each Player to a different stereo output from your PC (many ‘domestic’ PC sound cards, like a Creative Audigy, have three separate stereo outputs). Each of those separate outputs would then be connected to a different channel on your mixer. So probably the second thing to do is to go into Audio Devices and assign Players to PC outputs.

Most broadcast mixers also have a fader start capability (you lift the fader, the associated Player starts). If you’re using the kind of mixer which a band would use for its PA, or a ‘mixing’ DJ would use, you’re unlikely to have this. Similarly, a broadcast mixer would usually have a PFL button for each input. If those two features are available, mAirList can make use of them (usually by attaching the contacts to a ‘cannibalised’ gamepad), such that opening a fader on your mixer will indeed start Player ‘n;’ and by pressing a PFL button on your mixer, mAirList will place ‘that’ Player into PFL mode so you can audition the next song. This is what the Remote Control in config is principally used for; or perhaps to leverage a POS type keyboard into a ‘button box’ which will for example start the next track, switch from AUTO to ASSIST mode, and so on.

Once all that is done, you can think about changing the layout to something more appealing (or perhaps, more functional for YOUR needs).

Does that help? :wink:

BFN
CAD

Thank you Cad, not much to add. Let me just say that I’m currently improving the Mini Scheduler, adding some urgently needed protection features like artist separation and track separation.

I see that mAirList should be a self-contained package, so you don’t need any external tools to set up a “fairly good” station. On the other hand, professional music scheduling is a very complex thing, and I would never be able to mimic the functionality of the existing professional music scheduling systems (Powergold, Selector, …). So there must be a trade-off somewhere.

Actually, there was one very important thing I did miss out above: the ability to add cue points to your music tracks.

For Ctrl_Z’s benefit: you may be familiar with the ability of most CD players to set up an ‘A-B repeat’ by pressing buttons on the player to, in effect, say ‘I want to play just the section from 1:07 to 1:24.’ Setting cue points in mAirList allow you to set a number of cue points for each track, and the Auto Cue features make some of this automatic, by (optionally) setting a CueIn, FadeOut, and CueOut point the first time you add a track to the mAirList Playlist.

The CueIn and CueOut points are, if you like, the absolute start and end of a track. You can use these to eliminate silence at the start or end of a track (almost every CD ripper program, even nowadays, leaves the two second silence ‘gap’ at the end of tracks—for one that doesn’t, I recommend the registered version of the excellent dbPowerAmp ripper, which lets you perform Silence Removal ;)). In both Assist and Auto mode, mAirList won’t play anything before CueIn, nor after CueOut.

The FadeOut and StartNext cue points are used by mAirList in Auto mode to start the following track. They are ignored in Assist mode, unless you have Linked tracks by clicking the Link column in the Playlist.

The Ramp1 through Ramp3 points are used to mark the points where the vocal begins, or where the main beat starts. These are for the benefit of a presenter, so they can see (and get a countdown to) the start of the vocal, to ensure they don’t talk over it. They are also used by my IVP script which automates voicetracking to do the same thing.

The Outro point is another one which is for a presenter’s benefit (and again, is used by the IVP script). Outro is where the song is ‘finished,’ ususally the start of the third repeat of the chorus at the end, or when the vocal has finished and only an instrumental ‘tag’ or solo remains. Outro really means ‘you can start talking again HERE.’

Finally, you can (optionally) add HookIn, HookFade, and HookOut points. If you switch on Hook mode in a Player, then it will play just that section (similar to the ‘A-B repeat’ mentioned above). This allows you to quickly create ‘teasers’ which contain, say, just the first line or two of the chorus, and which you can play as part of a ‘coming up in the next hour’ link. You can create Hook Containers which contain a number of song Hooks, which you can play out as a unit.

Hope that helps, Ctrl_Z?

BFN
CAD

I assume that these separations will work ‘across’ hourly Playlists? So that if you say ‘keep Artists 2 hours apart,’ the algorithm WILL look at Playlist for the ‘previous’ two hours?

Actually, I’m sure you could, but that would be a full-time job! :smiley: And I’m sure that all of us here would much rather that you kept working on mAirList to make it EVEN better. ;D

BFN
CAD

Yeah that helps a lot. It’s a bit sad that those features aren’t available right now - that would be perfect.

I think I may have made my requirements seem more advanced than they are with stuff like ‘some songs more often than others’. I am pretty sure I have already seen a program that would do what I needed and was cheap or free. The only problem of course was that it was horribly unstable.

The way they did it (which is probably where I got my assumptions from) was this. You have a main playlist which loops. Instead of adding items explicitly you define a cycle, such as [New, Sting, Pop, Sting, Ad, Ad, Ad, Pop, Sting]. This rotates indefinitely picking items randomly from your categories. I have some experience in programing and as far as I can think, this should not be a hard algorithm to throw together. Basically your song distribution is defined in the way you make the list - for instance every third song above will be a new song. In terms of a commercial radio station this is way too simple, but it is good enough for some streams and LPFMs I think.

The only thing I can think of that may represent a challenge is making the player not rechoose an item from a category until every other item has been used. But in all I really did think what I was other would be pretty straight forward to find.

You said “the scheduling provided by the mAirList database is fairly basic”. I now understand what it doesn’t do, but is it possibly you could outline the things it can do? How do you use mairlists scheduling features? That way I can start to think about ways I could compromise and whether it will be useful to me.

I will probably not go down the scheduling route quite yet. Even though it does seem like what I am after to some extent, I was never looking for a walk-away solution. I am not really interested in those advanced features like day parting etc Because i will always have someone present. I probably just need a better idea of how auto-assist actually “assists” so I can make the most of it.

Thanks again. I really appreciate the effort you have gone to with your response, because I have learned much about radio as well as mairlist :smiley:

I suppose you should read the section about scheduling in the mAirListDB Wiki article (which will soon be part of the English manual Cad is preparing): http://wiki.mairlist.com/index.php/mAirListDB_HowTo#Using_the_Mini_Scheduler

The concept is pretty much the same as in the other software you mentioned: You create a number of categories, which are called “(virtual) folders” in mAirListDB, and move the songs into them as needed. Then you create one or more so-called hour templates, specifying how many songs to pick from each folder, and (optionally) an which order. Next, you create an hour template assignment, specifying which template is to be used on which part of the day etc. The Mini Scheduler will then create randomized playlists according to the conditions you specified in the hour templates, either one playlist at a time, or multiple playlists (e.g. for one week) in some kind of batch mode.

All of this is already possible in the current versions of mAirList 3.0. What’s still missing is:

  • Artist protection: Do not play a song of the same artist within x hours.

  • Randomization within a folder sequence. Currently, the songs from a particular folder will be scheduled in the same randomized order (until you change the contents of the folder, in which case the order is reset). That is, when you have four songs in a folder, mAirList will always play A-B-C-D, then again A-B-C-D and so on (with the songs from the other folders interleaved, of course). There should be some variation here, that is, the sequence should be first A-B-C-D, then B-A-D-C, A-D-C-B etc.

  • The possibility to specify additional conditions for a particular slot, e.g., that an item with a special type or tag should be picked.

I have been working on these improvements, and they will be part of the upcoming beta release.

OK, Ctrl_Z, let’s see …

The type of category scheduling you described is EXACTLY how all music schedulers work, from the simple, such as Tobasco’s Amazing Clockwheel (freeware which is well worth hunting down if you haven’t encountered it already: http://riograndemud.com/clockwheel/index.htm) or mAirList’s ‘mini-scheduler,’ all the way up to the Pro systems. The only difference is that the latter have a much larger number of ‘tweaks’ avaliable, like dayparting, etc., etc, and usually LOTS of reports and other stuff like interfacing to the station’s accounting systems to automatically invoice advertisers: stuff like that.

How does ‘auto-assist’ ‘assist’ the presenter?

Well, firstly let’s get something straight: Auto and Assist are two different and mutually exclusive operating modes. Most playout systems have this concept, unless they only work in a single mode (Station Playtlist only does Auto, I believe?).

Auto means mAirList will automatically play your tracks in playlist order, using FadeOut or StartNext (or EOF) to determine when to start the next item, without any further intervention.

Assist (short for ‘live assist,’ incidentally, as in ‘assist a live presenter’) means ‘manual.’ mAirList will still load the players in playlist order, but it’s up to the presenter to start and stop the players. Actually, I’d recommend using the Fadeout player button rather than the Stop button: that way, it avoids problems when the presenter forgets to fade down the player on the mixer! :wink: If you wish, you can switch off the auto-loading of players in Config, but most users leave this on (it’s the default).

In Assist mode, you can ‘automate’ a few tracks (to allow for a toilet break, for example?) by using the Link column in the playlist. If you click Link on any item, the next item will be played automatically in the same Player. You can obviously Link three or more tracks if you want to do a music sweep. In Link mode, mAirList WILL use the FadeOut and StartNext cue points, as if you were in Auto mode. I think of Link as a ‘temporary’ Auto mode. If you Linked a track by mistake, you can switch it off again by clicking the Link column a second time.

We haven’t yet mentioned the Cartwall: this is where you put things like jingles, stingers, and FX for immediate play. It’s the replacement for the cart players we all used to ‘love-hate’ in the Good Old Days. Soe stations use this to play their ads., but more usually it’s jingles and the like.

Hope that helps.

BFN
CAD

Yes that really helps a lot. Thank for your feed back - I am pretty sure I get it now.

A couple of related questions: 1. If I set a certain loop to start playing at say 9 in the morning and don’t set anything else for the rest of the day, am I correct to assume it will use that loop indefinitely? 2. If I put the same loop in at 9, 10, 11, 12 etc will that cause it to continue using the same loop as a apposed to restarting the loop from the start? 3. Can you at a glance know what is coming up 5 or 10 items from the one currently playing?

That article was extremely useful. I tried to use it to get started and answer some of these questions myself. Unfortunately I got stuck at a certain point and can’t figure out why the program doesn’t do as the wiki describes.

Here’s the problem: I got up to the add a database bit. I click on +Add. I choose mAirListDB (local mode). I click Create new database…

And that’s it. The program doesn’t bring up a dialogue, so I’m stuck. I tried creating a db file and using Open existing database… but that through an error.

There was a bug, please download the latest mAirList.exe from here: http://www.mairlist.com/download/mAirList/v3.0/snapshot/

Hi Cad, as always your replies are very helpful, however 1 error so I guess you have not used Station Playlist, it can indeed do Live Assist/Manual and even voice tracking.

Ctrl_Z, welcome to the mAirList forums - another free scheduler to look out for is IMS: http://bleucanard.blogspot.com/

Kind Regards Tony

I replaced the exe with the downloaded one. Same problem unfortunately. I’m on windows 7 x64.

Even for a 5-day event, you may want to give SPL Creator “Lite” a try - at least to give you some control over your Artist/Song repeat settings. You could take your chances with a large M3U playlist and have mAirList run the “randomizer” script every 6 hours but that’ll cause problems if you have many songs from the same artist/group.

Ideally you need some form of separation control - this is where a scheduler comes in. The “Lite” version of Creator is about £25 and will give you a handful of Song and Jingle groups to play with - you can then create an hourly “clock” template and fill it with A LIST, B LIST and C LIST songs with a weight of, say, 50%, 30%, 20% respectively.

If, however, you are not fussed about hearing 2 Queen songs in a row or Phil Collins, Genesis and Peter Gabriel in a “3 in a row” then mAirList’s DB scheduler will churn out playlists for you based upon the “folders” you have created in mAirListDB.

A dedicated scheduling package (even the £25 one) will help you manage (if programmed correctly) clashes like this.

Yes, if the playlist is visible within mAirList, just scroll up and down the playlist.

Kind Regards Tony

[quote=“Charlie, post:15, topic:6459”]Even for a 5-day event, you may want to give SPL Creator “Lite” a try - at least to give you some control over your Artist/Song repeat settings. You could take your chances with a large M3U playlist and have mAirList run the “randomizer” script every 6 hours but that’ll cause problems if you have many songs from the same artist/group.

Ideally you need some form of separation control - this is where a scheduler comes in. The “Lite” version of Creator is about £25 and will give you a handful of Song and Jingle groups to play with - you can then create an hourly “clock” template and fill it with A LIST, B LIST and C LIST songs with a weight of, say, 50%, 30%, 20% respectively.

If, however, you are not fussed about hearing 2 Queen songs in a row or Phil Collins, Genesis and Peter Gabriel in a “3 in a row” then mAirList’s DB scheduler will churn out playlists for you based upon the “folders” you have created in mAirListDB.

A dedicated scheduling package (even the £25 one) will help you manage (if programmed correctly) clashes like this.[/quote]

From what I have read in this thread mairlist will meet my needs for this year with a little supervision. I will not need to worry greatly about artist protection because I have chosen to not have a large database of music for this camp and scarcely any songs are from the same artist. In the event there is a run of similar songs, I will manually add something else to mix it up (I assume that can be done).

By the sounds of things mairlist will have what I need by next camp with its new features. I will probably use my experience from this coming camp to decide where to go to from here - indeed £25 is always worth thinking about.

I had looked into SPL before and it seemed reasonable. A key reason I never jumped at it was that it doesn’t include the related artists system that standard does. It might be just me, but I saw this as a serious weakness, because it gives me a false sense of security. In today’s pop music it is not uncommon to have a song by X, another by Y ft. X, and another by X, Y & Z. The lite version will not distinguish between those artists, so even though I have some artist protection it is not a sure bet.

PS. Amazing clock wheel looks very promising, but would not work on my system :-\

I had another thought. The reason it won’t create a new database may be to do with it not having permission to create files. I tried running it as administrator, but it still would not create a database. I’m not sure what else to try…

Another consideration in the scheduler debate is the format of the ‘tags’ (Cue in, Ramp etc) on each music item.

If you stick with mAirList then the same tags will be used in auto and assist, If you choose to use Station Playlist Creator (or another schedulting package) then you will need to make sure that the tag format used (APE in Station Playlist Creator) also knows about the categories which either means tagging each item twice or using a script such as the one created by streamer in http://forum.mairlist.com/index.php/topic,4190.0.html to copy tag info from one format to another.

Just a quick update. I have used the empty db download from http://forum.mairlist.com/index.php/topic,4263.15.html which has got me to the next step. It was necessary for me to have the latest mairlist exe.

Obviously, this does not count as a real fix, but I am up and running again.