As you might know, the next big thing I will work on is a new official mAirList database. If you have any suggestions for features and functionality, please post them into this thread.
Would this include the Browser GUI options/display - or just the “backend” side of it ?
If the former - the ability to show columns for various fields (which will sort when clicked) for Artist/Title/Length/Intro/Year etc. For the sake of complience (or convenience!), ID3 fields such as Year and Genre should be read so that they can be created/stored in the Database. Songs in multiple categories/genres would be useful. The Database could offer the following (amongst others) fields to edit/set to aide scheduling/playout:
Artist
Title
Length
Intro
Outro
Year
Genre/Category
Opener (whether the song has big/powerful start)
Speed/Mood (useful to schedule calm hours or pick the right jingles for songs)
If there is still going to be a basic scheduler built into it - Songs should be able to rotate via a set time (definable for Artist AND Titles), Jingles/Adverts/Voicetracks can be set to either sequential or random scheduling. Favourite commands/breaks/dummy markers can be stored for easy recall/scheduling ie: open line-in for news etc.
A really clever aspect of the DB would be to read-back and reconcile with the mAirList log to see what songs were played/skipped - allowing them to be re-scheduled if possible.
Custom parameters for searching, and for building a playlist will be a nice feature. What I mean? For example, user can define own song criterias, like e.g. outro type, bpm, gender, song topic, etc, etc. For example, I have 3 minutes to news, and I would find a song from 80’s, time less than 3:30 sing woman, outro type is fade and has more than 15 seconds, because before the news I would talk something. And in my opinion this feature will be usefull in building playlist clock templates, because we don’t need to use only categories, but e.g that criterias:
don’t play a song by female and next by female too, never play a slow song and next slow jingiel, etc.
In this way we can do everything we imagine, if someone wands a simply categories 80’s, 70’s, airplay, it’s no problem, if other person wands something advancet, it’s no problem too.
Custom parameters for searching, and for building a playlist will be a nice feature.
Parameters, which midzi calls “criterias”, shouldn’t be difficult to implement, as database is a set of them.
And it would be nice if when we’re adding music to the database, it scans mp3’s for ID3v2 tags, and extracts all the data. For example if an mp3 has a tag named “BPM” the database creates a parameter named the same. Personally I have all my mp3s tagged with a set of parametres (year/bpm/composer/publisher/language/gender) and this feature would significantly reduce the time of building a database.
For example, I have 3 minutes to news, and I would find a song from 80's, time less than 3:30 sing woman, outro type is fade and has more than 15 seconds, because before the news I would talk something.
Seems like I should not to share ideas with Midzi and webDude… They ask “what’s new in Protone?” or “What tricks are you yousing while programming your station?” and then add some new mAirlist feature requests… Have mercy!
i know its possible using scripting, but i dont know how to script so havent been able to do so, so far.
What i wish for is a recorder that upon hitting a key starts recording the output (basically the line in of the station output) but so that it records in the background. then when the button is pressed again, brings up a save window to allow you to save to database. (something to be brought in with the database features.)
i hope i have sort of explained correctly. it is a feature in Jutel’s RadioMan software if you can find info about it.