We are looking to introduce news on the hour at hour station and we were looking at integrating the news into the playlist itself without having to run an event as these can be easily turned off and have been in the past. What would be nice is if we could tick a box on the hour template so that instead of having soft or hard fixed times of 01:00:00 or 15:46:20 they would be XX:00:00 or XX:46:20 where XX means the hour in which it is assigned (this way we can choose easily which hours have news and which don’t without having to set multiple events), this way we would have our news items come in on time regardless of what song is playing, if i understand correctly.
If this exists let me know as it would be a great help, or if there is a way around this without using events then also let me know.
Fixed times, when used in an hour template, are always relative to the top of the hour.
That is, when you set a fixed time to “00:45:00”, and that template is used to generate e.g. the 15:00:00 hour, mAirList will turn the time to “15:45:00” in the generated playlist.
There is one shortcoming at the moment, however: The scheduler will set the fixed time on that particular item, but will not be able to reposition the item accordingly. In other words, it can happen that there is a gap (or overlap) before the fixed time item because of its fixed time, and an overlap (or gap) after it. So for the moment, you should make sure to have enough music before and after the item.
I am aware of this issue and will address it in a future relaese.
Oddward: Remember also that unless your news bulletin is streamed in and has a fixed duration (e.g. the Sky Radio News satellite feed in the UK), it’s likely to be a different duration each time. This can porentially cause problems if mAirList thinks it lasts (for example) 2’30" and the new audio file for that hour happens to be 2’36".
I have some scripts which will schedule pre-recorded news audio into a running playlist on a hourly basis, but that would require an event to be set up, which you say you want to avoid. The advantage is that you can use different files so long as the file for the upcoming top-of-the-hour is always available with a fixed name and in a fixed place at the time in the hour when you run the script. For example: you get your news audio file at about 30’ past the hour. So you set the event to run the script at (say) 40’ past the hour to give you time to sort it if naything goes wrong, of if the delivery is a bit late that hour.
Any special reason for avoiding events? Are there other timed ‘things’ running on your playout mAirList PC which could clash? Events are rally easy to set up once you get your head around them (I think the manual explains it very well — at least, others have told me that).
Please let us know if we can be of any further help.
If the duration changes, that’s not a problem, because mAirList will update the item as soon as it’s loaded into a player.
BUT: You should remove all cue points (in particular Fade Out and Cue Out) from the item imported into the database. Otherwise the playback will stop prematurely when a new version of the file is longer.
I have recently posted some sort of “cookbook” to the German FAQ section, but haven’t had the time to translate it yet. Will do so soon.
