Playlist will play a coumple seconds and stops suddenly

English General
21

Sure, these are the 3 tasks I setup in Configuration under Actions.

  1. First we open up the Line Input for the Encoder to push the stream to the internet.

  2. Next we need to put mAirList into Automation mode, so it begins to play automatically.

  3. Finally we need to Load and Play the playlist for the current hour. But, and here’s the cool bit, we tick “Skip to current time” so the Automation play back jumps to the current time in the playlist, and continues to play from there, rather than starting at the beginning of the list.

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22

Thanks for those actions Matt, they work like a charm.

23

Im still confuse on the programing of shows and stations ids.
[b]

  1. Stations ids: [/b] Do i set this on the events tab ( lets say that i have 7 stations ids, and i want to play them on the top of the hour and at each half of hour. how do i set up this? on the master playlist template hour i only see the full hour.

2. Shows: let say that a show last 1 hour. do i create the show’s sequence on the manage template and create the show template? how do i repeat more days on the same template? if a hour template show plays, does it have priority over the events that might overlap the template show, or how do i set priorities?

thanks for all the help

24

No problem.

I’ll walk you through a show.

For each show you create an Hourly Template, and to keep things simple name it after the show. In my case (image below) I called mine Global House Party after the name of the show.

The start of the template has a Start of hour marker like all templates, only this one is set to Hard fixed time because the show should always begin at the top of the hour. The event we created earlier in this thread makes sure that happens.

Next I inserted a Specific item block and tell it to select a particular jingle, from a particular folder in the database. In this case a music based top of the hour jingle. As I know how long the jingle is, I also set the Estimated duration to 00:00:08 as it is 8 seconds long.

The next item you see is called a Dummy. It doesn’t play anything at all, all it does is change the Now Playing info on my website to the name of the show. Not actually needed, but looks good for listeners. I won’t dive into that here, as it isn’t needed to make the playlist work.

Next we have the show itself. Now I use a Random item from folder block, but this is because the folder it selects from only contains the Global House Party shows, and nothing else. I also set the Estimated duration on this item, as the show itself is a minimum of 59 minutes and 55 seconds in length.

Finally the last item is a End of hour marker, and it is configured to Soft fixed time. I use soft fixed time because some of the Global House Party shows finish a few minutes past the hour, and I don’t want the music that plays in the next hour to cut the end of the show off.

Once you’ve saved the template, you need to assign it to the hour your want the show to air in. In my case that is 6pm on a Friday, and I repeat it at 6pm on a Saturday. See the image below.

Now the template is assigned to the hour, you need to generate playlists for the week. This is done in the Generate button on the tool bar.

The images below demonstrate everything I talked about above.

[ol][li]First image is the Hour Template I walked you through.[/li]
[li]Next we have my database folder structure, with the Global House Party folder highlighted, and last Friday’s show in the folder list.[/li]
[li]And finally we have the finished generated playlist that is executed on Friday at 6pm.[/li]
[li]And finally I show you that the template is assigned to 6pm on Friday, and Saturday in the Template Assignments window.[/li][/ol]

Hope that lot helps. I should really get a consultancy fee lol

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25

thanks a lot, the show part makes a lot of sense now. My pending issue is the station ids, do i schedule the at the events tab or on the template. do the events take priority over the template? if a show plays, and station id is supposed to play at the same time, which 1 take priority? or there is a conflict?

thanks

26

On the template. Below is one of my Hour templates, and you can see the green Random item from folder blocks I use for Jingles and Idents. The events tab just executes tasks, that’s all. The hour template does the rest.

Oh and a word of comfort. Once you’ve setup all your hour templates and music templates, you never need to touch them again unless you want to adjust your output.

The Hour and Music templates are designed to automate the process of playlist generation, and generally make the job easier. The alternative is to simply add music, jingles, and shows to each hours playlist yourself in the Playlist tab, by dragging and dropping items from the database folders, and clicking on the Save button once you’ve got an hours worth of stuff.

But, to be honest, taking the time to set up the templates is a no brainer, as it would take hours and hours to manually create a whole weeks worth of playlists with the alternative method.

I know which one I prefer!

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27

Ok, thanks for all the advice. After importing the shows and generation the templates with the sequence that i want for each show, i go and generate the playlist. The issue is that when i generate the playlist it only schedules the hour template of the shows, and not the music. How do i incorporate whatever is left from the shows in the hour template to pick up the music template and add the music? i know that I’m doing something wrong.

Thanks for the help

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28

What you need to do next is create an Hour template, to be used to fill the gaps between each show.

[ol][li]So head into Manage Templates, and on the Hour Templates tab click on New.[/li]
[li]Next, give your template a name, then click on the Items tab.[/li]
[li]In here you’ll see a default template layout. First of all I would change the Start of hour and End of hour marker settings.[/li]
[li]In the Settings tab for each marker is the Timing setting. By default it is set to Hard fixed time. This setting would cause any audio being played in the previous hour, to be cut off when the next hour starts. Instead, we want it to start the next hour when the last item in the previous hour has finished. To do this select Soft fixed time for both the Start of hour and End of hour markers.[/li]
[li]Next, if all you want to do is play an hour of randomly select music from one folder, the current green Fill with random items block will work fine. All you would need to do is click on where it says Unsorted (see my picture below), and select the folder you want the music to come from. However, if you want to do something more advanced, and for example play a Jingle every 2 tracks, you need to modify the Hour template further.[/li]
[li]So, to have a Jingle play every 2 tracks we first need to remove the green Fill with random items block. Click on it, and press delete. You’ll now see it says Underrun in red. This means there’s not enough items to fill up the hour.[/li]
[li]To start our Hour template we will play a random Jingle. Drag the Random item from folder block into the red Underrun pane.[/li]
[li]Double click on where it says Duration to open up the blocks configuration.[/li]
[li]Set the Estimated duration to the average length of one of your jingles, for example 8 seconds. This helps the template to calculate how much time is left to fill.[/li]
[li]Finally, select your Jingles folder from the Folder drop down list and click on Ok.[/li]
[li]You’ll notice now the Underrun pane has re-calculated how much time is left to fill, now you’ve added a jingle. Next we need to add some music.[/li]
[li]You could use the Random item from folder block again, but I’ll assume you’ve created a Music Template first, and you’ve assigned it to each hour. So drag the Music (one song) block instead into the red Underrun pane.[/li]
[li]Again, double click on the block to open it’s configuration. The block is already setup to take a single track from Block number 1 of your Music Template, and an estimated duration is already set. Adjust the duration if you think it isn’t right, other wise click Ok.[/li]
[li]To play another track, just drag another Music (one song) block over, placing it below the previous one. And to place a jingle after that, repeat the steps above. You can also copy and paste blocks by using the right-click menu, and you can also drag blocks up and down the pane to change there order.[/li][/ol]

I’ve include an example below of the first four items we’ve done.

Once you’ve completed your Hour Template, click on Ok to save it, then assign the template to the empty hours as need. Then just generate your playlists!

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29

The issue on hand is as follows: I have shows that are 15", 29", other more than 1 hours upto 3 hours. How do I tackle these? Normally all the empty time could be live broadcast or just plain music from my templates. If I set end of the hour to normal or exclude back… Should that work? Or at the end of the show I should fill with music?

30

For the short shows, just create an Hour Template that plays the show, and for the rest of the hour template fill it with music and jingles as I showed above. But, you’ll need to make sure you have your normal Music template assigned for that hour in the Music template section of Template Assignments, so the playlist generator knows where to get music from.

For shows longer that an hour, you don’t need to do anything. As long as the End of hour marker is a Soft Fixed time, and the following two hours also use Soft Fixed time for the Start and End of hour markers, then the show will play uninterrupted until the audio file completes.

However, it is important that the 3 hour show is a single audio file, be that MP3 or WAV. If it is split into single files, the scheduler will drop off any files after the end of the Hour.

31

Thanks for the advice, I starting to understand how the software functions. Can you explain to me the difference between soft time, normal and exclude from backtime?

32

Did everything as advice, but i noticed the following: mairlist loads the hour of the playlist, it plays everything and when it approaches to the next hour, skips the following hour of the playlist and loads an infinite silence. Even though the playlist that was generated has all the items that needs to be played, but it adds a infinite silence and skips the whole hour.

Please help me, i dont know what am i doing wrong

33

here is my hour template and the sample how i did the sequence. i included the 2 hours that my playlist has full of music and shows, but in reality, mairlist did a silence. hopefully this makes more sense

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34

sorry for all the posts, here is the main window that as you can see on the left side where one sees the timeline of the playing items, one can see that the green play icon is grayed out. do i need to update any setting? please help me.

Thanks

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35

“skips the following hour of the playlist and loads an infinite silence” - to answer that, I need to see what the next hour looks like.

Does it load the next hours template?

Did you configure an event the way I showed you earlier, via the Event Scheduler (click on the Events button) in mAirList? If you did, it will automatically load the next hours playlist, appending it to the bottom of the current hour.

In answer to your question above, what you’re seeing there with the greyed out tracks is correct, and I’ll explain why.

When the playlist was generated, the total duration of the final playlist for the 1pm to 2pm hour is a little over the 1 hour mark. This normally happens if some of the tracks are long, for example on my station I have some dance tracks that are 6 minutes long. So if you have a few of those in a playlist containing 12 tracks, it will push the total duration of that hour beyond the 1 hour mark.

Now mAirList is clever, real clever. By setting the Soft Fixed Time in the Start of, and End of Hour markers mAirList won’t interrupt the current song playing when it tips over the hour. Instead what it will do is finish playing the current song, before moving on to the next hour.

What is even more clever is, if there are any tracks after that song, so in this case “Eres Fiel” starts before the end of the hour, but finishes at 2:02pm, as that song finishes when the next hour should have started, mAirList thinks “Ok, I’ll skip the next 3 tracks from the 1pm to 2pm playlist, and begin playing the 2pm to 3pm playlist.”

This is good because unless you play the news or a show at the top of the hour, you don’t want your tracks from the previous hour being cut off by the start of the next hour, and also you don’t want the previous hour spilling into the next hour. Otherwise, the spill over will continue through out the day, and throw out all your playlists.

36

The screen shots were from the Playlist that had the issue. You can see all songs and shows that supposedly had to play @2pm and after the loaded the infinite silence. At that point I waited the software and restart it to re load the Playlist. It skipped the 2pm to 3pm and at 2pm created the infinite silence.

The append database and load Playlist was created in the event scheduler… I will keep my eye on it so I can screen shot it. Thanks

37

Ok, I don’t see the 2pm to 3pm playlist in your screen shots above, only the end of the 1pm to 2pm playlist.

If it is going into infinite silence after 2pm, then I need to see that playlist to work out why.

38

I probably got confused with the times. ;D the screen shots are for the Playlist with the issue. I will monitor and see if I can repeat the issue.

39

Doh! No problem ;D

40

[quote=“mattauckland, post:30, topic:10901”]For shows longer that an hour, you don’t need to do anything. As long as the End of hour marker is a Soft Fixed time, and the following two hours also use Soft Fixed time for the Start and End of hour markers, then the show will play uninterrupted until the audio file completes.

However, it is important that the 3 hour show is a single audio file, be that MP3 or WAV. If it is split into single files, the scheduler will drop off any files after the end of the Hour.[/quote]

Another option is to put all scheduled content (also multiple files) in the first hour, and remove all content from the second and third content, including the start/end of hour.

And it is important that you use “Append database playlist” in the hourly event. Not “Load and play”.

If you use another event with “Generate playlists” (for unattended scheduling), add a dummy to the second and third hour, so the playlists will not be re-generated.