This may be a feature request rather than a general topic… But we shall see!
I was hoping of somehow restricting how often a song could be played. I.E Song A can be played X number of times in X amount of time.
We don’t have the most intelligent of presenters (were a student station) so asking them to stop playing the songs over and over again just dosent work! It would be great if there was some sort of way of setting this per folder or per track… And maybe a global option aswell?
Maybe i could even do this as a script and warn the user when they attempt to play a song thats already been played…
Unfortunately there’s just some songs that we get sick of hearing 10-15 times a day!
If you’re using mAirListDB and the Mini Scheduler to prepare playlists for automated or presenter-led playout, then yes, you can set up Separation values in the database to prevent this.
If you’re using mAirList for live assist, then no, there isn’t any method other than discipline/sanctions of presenters to prevent the same song being played too frequently; and unless anyone knows better (?), I don’t think ANY playout system has this feature.
I can’t think of any way you could do this with a script in live-assist, either.
Maybe you should consider using mAirListDB and the Mini Scheduler to prepare playlists in advance? With suitable disciplinary measures if any presenter ‘decides’ to change the tracks the database has prepared (like taking the presenter off-air for a month).
Both Jazler and RSPlayer can “strike-out” an artist/group if he/she/they are played and do so for x minutes. PSquared’s Myriad will look at the AutoTrack (their accompanying scheduler) station database and give you a simple Artist, Song separation and last/next day offset display - the values appearing in red if they break any of the rules which apply to that category. If you open that track’s “Information” window then you are given a week/month + hour grid showing the artist+song positions scheduled so far.
With regards to getting this sort of thing into mAirList - perhaps a new column in the mAirListDB window that offers the last played time so that it can be sorted and allow you to pick the song played the least. A very primitive form of the “song index card” method
I like the idea of a ‘last played’ column in mAirListDB. Might be good to have that as an optional column in playlists as well; and as you say, have any ‘breaches’ highlighted. Then again, the separations in mAirListDB only apply to scheduled tracks and not ‘ad hoc’ selections.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but are asking mAirList to do too much? I thought the scheduler was suppose to be only a basic scheduler (although it seems more advanced than that). If you want the more advanced features, then you would purchase scheduling software.
I would agree, Alec, but it sounds like the OP is wanting to show some sort of warning in live assist mode, when a presenter plays a song which has been played within the past ‘x’ hours; rather than wanting to apply title and artist separation in the scheduler.
In other words, when you decide to play a certain track and manually drop it into the playlist (or on to a Player). I don’t think he’s using playlists created by a scheduler, because then that problem would (hopefully!) not arise, right?
We only use the scheduler for automation. Unfortunately shows dont use the scheduler, as its hard enough getting them to figure out how to use a damn microphone properly let alone how to acctually organise a show! (Yes… Some of our presenters really are that bad!)
So unfortunately for the time being it looks like were going to be using the live assist!
