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?
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