Repeat broadcasted recordings that we're broadcasted somewhere last week

[prr]

Hello,

First of all, I’d like to stress that I am very happy with mAirList and I am impressed by all features that come out of the box and even more by all functionality you can add yourself via scripting.

We’re currently in the process of replacing Carmen by mAirList. To accomplish this we have to come up with mAirList solutions for specific Carmen functionality that we are using.

One of the features that Carmen provides is automatically record broadcasts and repeat the broadcasts at a later time without explicitly specifying a date. All broadcasted shows are automatically recorded and if you want to broadcast the recording again of a show that was broadcasted last Friday at 8 PM, then you specify just that: ‘Recording of Friday 12 PM’.

Suppose you want to broadcast the
show again each Friday at 3 PM. In this case the recording of the 12 PM broadcast, earlier that day, is broadcasted again. On the other hand if you want to broadcast the show again at say 10 AM, then the broadcast of 12 PM of last weeks Friday is broadcasted again (since 12 PM is not reached on this Friday yet).

We want to mimic this behaviour in mAirList, because we have a lot of recording whichs have to be
broadcasted again and we don’t want to change the scheduled date manually each week.

The recording part was quite easy. We’ve created a database item ‘START RECORDING’ and assigned
a start action ‘Start Recording’ to it with output file name: V:\AirCheck\recording-%Y-%M-%D-%h.mp3’.
We did something similar for ‘Stop recording’ and added both items to the playlists of the shows we want to record. We then added this to our hour template at voila. This is working, like a charm.

However playing back without supplying a fixed date or data pattern, is not that easy.
Remember that we want to use a command like ‘Recording of Friday 12 PM’.

This is what we’ve came up with so far… We’ve created an Automatic File Container with title ‘Recording of Friday 20 uur’. We supplied the folder ‘V:\AirCheck’ as Source Folder and we left Filename Pattern empty, since we can only supply actual dates or date patterns there. Then we created a scipt ‘determine_date_of_last_week.mls’ which determines the correct date and time by parsing and processing strings like ‘Recording of Friday 12 PM’. This script comes up with a file name like ‘recording-2025-02-14-12.mp3’ and we added an action on start to the automatic file container (AFC) which would execute this script when the AFC item is started.
So far so good; this is all working fine. Now our idea was filling the filename pattern field of the AFC
with this determined filename. We assume that the AFC will pick the correct file in that case, because the AFC is evaluated after the start script has executed. Unfortunately we are not able to fill the Filename pattern, since the AutomaticFileContainer interface is not availalable for scripting.

I have a couple of questions…

1. Is my assumption right and should it work like a described, once the IAutomaticFileContainer interface is availabe?
2. Can I accomplish this in another way. Perhaps I’m missing something?
3. Will the IAutomaticFileContainer interface be made available any time soon, for scripting?

Please advise and I hope you can come up with a solution for this problem.

Kind regards,
Marco

[Stefan_Hillen]

@prr

Can I accomplish this in another way. Perhaps I’m missing something?

For some of my clients I realized this with a sub-playlist and a special hour template for the sub-pl that build it automatically via the scheduler…

In the main hour template you can not only use an element “All from Sub-Playlist”, but define an offset.

E.g.: A show that’s planned in a sub-playlist to be played at 10AM can be automatically re-planned in the main pl again at 10PM bei setting the offset to -12.

mAirList will then look for the sub-playlist in the 10AM slot instead of the regular 10PM slot it regularly would look at when planning for the 10AM main playlist.

The big advantage: You could manually prepare shows (as Elements in sub-playlists) weeks or months ahead by just saving the respective sub-playlists (or just let mAirList schedule then automatically).

O know it’s complicated and hard to explain here. But maybe this helps you to find a solution.

[prr]

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for your reply. Perhaps I don’t understand your proposal, but I think this is a different scenario. Usage of Sub-playlists would be a viable alternative when we always want to rebroadcast a show the same day, however most of the time we want to rebroadcast a show from another day e.g. the show that was broadcasted on Monday 10 - 12 AM should be rebroadcasted on Saturday 18 - 20 PM. How can you do this with a sub-playlist?

Moreover not all our shows are prepared in mAirList. Some of our DJ’s still use CD’s which are played with an actual CD player. Those CD’s are not part of the automation (and never will be), but they are part of the show. The whole show should be rebroadcasted. In don’t think you can do this with sub-playlists either, since part of the music is not controlled by mAirList, we need to broadcast the original recording of the show.

I think sub-playlists poses another problem, because it will spin out of control for us. We have at least 15 shows that need to be rebroadcasted. This means 15 additional sub-playlists on top of the many hour templates we already have.

The only solution I can come up with, is the one I presented earlier. Only thing is, the IAutomaticFileContainer interface is not available through scripting (or is the chm-file simply too old?). Do you know when it will available?

Like I said, perhaps I did’nt understand you correctly and is using sub-playlists a solution to the problem after all. Maybe you can elaborate on it a bit more and tell me how you can use it with recorded files.

Kind regards,
Marco