Hey, Tondose, I agree, 10% is very aggressive. After some more investigation, I would revise this down to ±5% Personally, I would never use that speed, but there needs to be some headroom in this setting.
I’ve run a station on another playout system for many moons. Once I mistakenly set its “Auto Speed” feature to 4%, it sounded very, very bad. In that playout system it has individual settings for the + and the -. Currently set to +2% and -2%, this feature, in combination with other features, like the overlapping of intros and outros, allows this station to run very close to the hour and very rarely runs over or under by 20 sec unless a human has done something wrong. As I said, the Min/Max ± of 5% is all about the headroom.
From the other playout systems Help doc Auto Speed: When enabled, said Automation system will play category tracks (songs, not spots) slightly faster or slower to gain or lose time.
The Min and Max speed defines the minimum and maximum speed said Automation system may use, in percentage. said Automation system will calculate the required speed based on the remaining time, the total duration of remaining songs in the playlist, any Song Outro Times set, and the length of the last track it determines will be playing at the top of the hour, or the next instant event time. Maximum values are Min -5 and Max 5. eg. Min -2, Max 3.
Also from the other playout systems Help doc "Song Outro Times: When enabled, said Automation system will utilize Outro timed songs to shorten the playlist time. Tracks will segue earlier at a calculated position between the Outro and Segue times. Most songs should be Outro timed using the Feature in said Automation system for this feature to work well.
Your samples, side by side, do sound bad. But played in a set of songs most listeners wouldn’t notice.
All that said. My problem still remains “How do I set mAirlist to play closer to the top of the hour?”
I regularly get a song starting with only 20sec to the top of the hour.
How can I stop this?
Is there a time-checking feature that I can set?
Will mAirlist consider a stretching compressing “Speed of song” feature?
Has someone developed a script that will insert audio that will end the hour within a ±30sec window?