Hooks

English Feature Requests
1

Noticed a thread about “Hooks” in the German section, and followed some of it - I assume that you know what Hooks are now ?!

I’ve been getting around it by just adding ;PFL RAMP TEST to a PFL button, so that it jumps to the vocal… It’s not ideal, but gives your listeners an idea of the song. If you are willing to add 2 more Cue points, Torben - Hook In+Out would be a welcome addition. Just so you’re clear (I didn’t follow the whole German thread), a Hook is a catchy part/chorus of the song… A lot of stations play these before an Ad-Break to show you what’s coming up… RCS Master Control has this facilitity on it’s custom keyboard :wink:

2

You can use the “alternative cue point” feature for this. Just click the cue in position label in the PFL dialog, and a dialog will pop up where you can add “alternatives” for the cue in position.

Torben

3

OK, good stuff… But what’s the sequence to actually make it work from a HotKey ? Ideally, I’d like to have just 1 button to start/stop the alternative cue.

4

Would we be able to chain hooks together in the following fashion?

Station Id
Hook 1
Hook 2
Hook 3
Station Id

As a scheduled event

Simian allows this in a slightly different way:

You tag all your hooks
Using a macro event (which knows which station id’s to use)
Tell the playout to play X number of hooks after X number of songs.

Pretty handy as it trails ahead within an hour.

Kind Regards Tony

5

Tony,
Assuming that we can work out the commands (or Torben comes to the rescue), you can certainly achieve it with a COMMAND entry in the playlist. I’m currently trying to work out how to play an alternative CUE marker in PFL using the Commands.

You’ve probably found the drop-down box for the cue/ramp/fade/out settings, Tony… Well - Torben says you can use those a 2nd Cue point as a hook, but I can’t get PFL to start it via a command. At the moment, I have to use the drop-down menu…

6

At the moment, you have to use the drop-down menu. Adding two new types of cue points is no problem either, but as hook in/out has the same semantics as cue in/out (or cue in/fade out, whatever you prefer), it’s more feasible to treat them as alternatives to the existing cue points.

How about the ability to assign a distinct name to each alternative? You could then use a script like

item.CueIn.SetValue(item.CueIn.GetAlternativeByName('HOOK'));

to copy the value from the alternative “HOOK” to the active value. This script could be applied to the currently selected item by a hotkey, or through a popup menu. (Hey, nice idea, adding scripts to the popup menu!)

Torben

7

Ideally hooks could be played in the way I previously described from Simian.

You set a command to play the in/out station ID , the number of hooks and the number of songs away from the current position.

It then randomly plays hooks from any upcoming track in the current hour (provided they have the tags marked within the track).

So If you set 3 and 5

In 5 songs time it will play an ID (such as coming up…) then 3 hooks from tracks so tagged in the playlist and then play the station ID.

As enabled from a macro command, is the scripting capable of this?

If so please can we have an example as coding seems rather daunting.

Kind Regards Tony

8

Hi, anyone any further with hooks?

Ideally some scripts to fire them from within a plalist would be desirable.

Kind regards tony