Placing drops automatically onto ramps

Wanted by many, anxiously by some, here is a script to automatically place drops onto the ramp of an item.

How does it work?

  • Following items have to be scheduled in this particular order:

    1. A trigger item of zero-length with a particular title to be set in the constant BTCAPTION (default is ++ Drop ueber Ramp ++).

    2. An item onto which the drop has to be placed (“ramp item”).

    3. The drop itself.

  • Note:

    • The ramp item must feature a Ramp1- as well as a StartNext-Marker.

    • The drop duration must not be longer than the respective ramp.

  • After all this having complied with, a starting player initiates a check after said trigger item. If existing, the ramp item’s StartNext-Marker will be set to match the drop onto its Ramp1-Marker. Subsequently the level of the ramp item wil be lowered by a defined amount (to be set in the constant RAMPLEVEL).

  • But there is a catch lying in the architecture of the mAirList software: The automatic start of an item is always triggered to the end (or the StartNext-Marker) of the actually playing item. Thus the subsequent item would start at the end of the drop, instead of the ramp item’s end. So the StartNext trigger has to be reinstated in some way to keep the scheduled order.

  • This is accomplished by attaching silence at the end of the drop, whose length matches the difference between drop end and the initial StartNext. For this purpose a container is created which the drop as well as the silence filler is placed into.

  • Thus, after an automatic drop has been executed there will run two players in parallel: the one with the ramp item to be played out, and the other with said silence to trigger the subsequent item.

 

My thanks go to @calypso60 who had the essential idea.

 


Auto-Drop by Tondose 1.0.mls (7,2 KB)

1 Like

N.B.: This construction will also work if only one single player for automation is employed.

1 Like

Might evoke an error if too few items in the playlist exist. This version has that fixed.

Auto-Drop by Tondose 1.01.mls (7,5 KB)

 

For clarification: The so-called trigger item is nothing else than a dummy item with the desired title set to.

1 Like

And with this version here the as yet mandatory StartNext-marker can be omitted:

Auto-Drop by Tondose 1.1.mls (7,1 KB)

Version 1.2 skips the drop automatically if it doesn’t fit onto the Ramp and is marked as a Jingle.

Version 1.3 takes CueIn-Markers into account.