This posting is directed at those who use attributes within generated playlists. My question is why would you use an attribute when you could just as easily use different virtual folders? To illustrate, for music playout I could have one virtual folder titled “Music” and then use the attributes “fast”, “slow”, etc. But just as easily, I could create virtual folders titled “Music Fast” and “Music Slow” and schedule those. The playout would be the same.
Obviously, the uses of attributes must have an advantage, or they wouldn’t be used. Please, what am I missing? ???
In my opinion, folders are the more “natural” way of doing this, in particular when you think of them as “categories” or “rotations”.
Attributes can be used as a second level of selection. For example, you can specify that the first song in an hour should not only be from a particular folder, but also a “fast” one.
The use of variables for a particular attribute value makes this even more interesting. For example, imagine you want an automatic time announcement at the top of the hour with 24 pre-recorded time announcement audio files. This is how you could do it:
Place the 24 files into a virtual folder “Time Announcement”.
Add an attribute “Hour” to each file, specifying the hour as a two-digit number. For example, the “3 a.m.” announcement has an “hour” value of “03”.
In the hour template, insert new item for folder “Time Announcement” at the top of the list and make it fixed.
In the attribute filter for this item, enter “%d” (without the quotes) as the value for “Hour”.
Now when the playlists are generated, the Mini Scheduler will magically pick the correct time announcement file each time.
ah ha! The second level of selection makes a lot of sense. So, perhaps attributes could be loosely thought of as sub-folders or perhaps “rotations within the virtual folders.” Interesting!
Okay, thank you both. This leads to another question. Let’s say that within a virtual folder I have three “groups” of music but only two attributes. The first group is assigned attribute “slow”, the second is assigned attribute “fast”, but the third “group” has no attribute assigned.
I’m now building templates. I list the music folder, but I don’t list an attribute. Question: when a playlist is being generated, is the “group” without an attribute scheduled more than the two with attributes? Or do all three groups get the same attention?
If you do not specify any attribute filters, the Mini Scheduler will ignore the attributes altogether. So you might end up with all slow or all fast songs, by chance.
While I think of it, is it possible to select an Attribute value of ‘blank’ or ‘null’ or similar when building Mini Scheduler hourly templates? This is of course different from ignoring the Attribute completely.
So in Alec’s case, he would be able to select an item from Virtual Folder x where a specified Attribute is ‘missing’ or ‘blank’ (as opposed to a specific value) when building his templates. That would save a mAirList user a lot of time when adding new Attributes to existing items. You would for example only need to tag Slow and Fast items, and leave the rest blank, or just not bother adding the ‘Tempo’ Attribute to them.
If this isn’t available already (I’m not sitting at a mAirList PC), I think it would be a useful addition, assuming of course it would not be too difficult or time-consuming to implement.
So you’re saying to have an additional value of NULL that when set as an attribute will schedule only items that lack an attribute?
Or in the example I listed earlier, the NULL filter would schedule only items without attributes “fast” or “slow”? And then if no filter at all were applied, all attributes (including NULL) would be ignored. Yes?
Not quite: NULL is programmer’s shorthand (i.e. directed to Torben) for ‘there isn’t a value here.’ This would happen if you added a Attribute (for example, Tempo) but didn’t give it any Value.
I think you would need a selection option named something like ‘blank’ or ‘no value’ (NULL is a kind of technical name for this), so that when you specified that ‘no value,’ er, … Value as your selection, the Mini Scheduler would pick an item which either doesn’t have the Attribute on it at all, or (as mentioned above) the Attribute has been added, but its value is either all blanks (spaces), or is empty/NULL (nothing at all was specified in the Value column). Does that explain it better?
The upshot of all this is that you would only need to add an Attribute to those items which require one. So to take the arbitrary example of Tempo, you would only need to add a ‘Tempo’ Attribute to items which you reckon are (say) Fast or Slow, and not bother adding it to all the others.
So you could then select Fast, Slow, or ‘other’ Tempo attribute tracks to your hourly templates; but you would need some way of specifying ‘other’ in the Edit Hour Template dialog, which would mean ‘select an item without any Tempo attribute, or an item where there is a Tempo attribute, but where the attribute’s Value is empty/NULL or all blanks/spaces.’ At present, the Filter dropdown only lets you choose a Value which already exists. I would suggest that a new entry reading something like (blank or not present) should be added as the first entry in those dropdown lists.
Very interesting Topic…
I remember there were several request for beeing able to schedule folders recursive, that would help even more. I just select the top folder and to schedule items only by Attributes.
Torben do you plan somehting like that? Than you can remove the word “mini” from the Scheduler
