Station ID / Clock Wheel for Broadcast & Auto DJ - Airtime Support Discussions on Sourcefabric Forum

Walt Petrosky

I am helping a new volunteer community radio station. We are trying to move to Air Time however we have discovered a hangup in programming. The hourly station IDs.

We have a 10 second station ID we would like to play every hour on the top of the hour, or twice an hour. This would leave 50 seconds of audio blank. This is a huge hang up for our station managers, etc. We also have to create the station ID at least 24 or 48 times.

My solution would be to make it one minute, but apparently that isn't the flexibility others are thinking.

Two questions.

#1. What are others doing for hourly and/or twice an hour station ids?

#2. Are there any tools you use to auto-dj MP3s. Comercial solutions such as SamBroadcaster can do this for only $350 per year for us as a non profit. AirTime is a tough sell because others at our station have experience with it. Is there any type of auto-dj feature, or an open source program I can use with air-time to create big mp3s for easy upload to airtime?

Thank you

Walt Petrosky

Rick Munday

I just got it installed here, so I don't have much insight yet. But I actually just noticed the ID issue. TOH and BOH ID's are important. Sure we could create a 60 second ID but that's kind of an obscene solution.

I'm not following the second question, are you just asking about an AutoDJ function like SAM has? It would be nice, and I don't see a way to sort media by sub folders (this would also be nice feature - allowing us to sort by Genre, News, Promos and etc) so I'm thinking this is a no. BUT shows could be created outside as a single file for the desired program length.

Josh McLain

Hi Walt,

Normally stations program shows in hour and half hour blocks and put their station identification at the top of every playlist. This ensures that the playlist gets played every hour and that it bumps right up next to the music.

As for auto-dj, I can tell you that while we currently don't have it, it's near the top of our feature request list and it's something we're looking to implement in the future. Unfortunately we don't have a concrete timeline yet. I can understand others apprehension and while SAM Broadcaster would take care of your auto-dj needs, I think you'll find that Airtime has a much more robust scheduling and automation system. It sounds like what you would want to do is create a playlist and reuse it, as that would accomplish the same thing as editing tracks together into one huge MP3.

Let me know if I didn't completely answer either of those questions.

Josh

Albert FR

you have another way
modifying your ls_script.liq ( you found documentation on the liquisoap website) for doing that.

Rick Munday

Josh,

Is there a minimum time length for tracks? i.e. Station ID's? We could always add in a couple promos or something to fill voids.

Are there plans to have sub folders under the tracks listing on playlist builder?

Rick

Albert FR

how I say before you can do that with ls_script.liq :

def final_fade(a,b)
  sequence([fade.final(duration=2.,a),b])
end
def out_fade(a,b)
  sequence([a,fade.initial(duration=2.,b)])
end

timed_promotions = switch([
  ({08h00m},delay(60.,single("/my/jingle.mp3")),
  ({09h00m},delay(60.,single("/my/jingle.mp3")),
  ({10h00m},delay(60.,single("/my/jingle.mp3")),
  ({11h00m},delay(60.,single("/my/jingle.mp3")),
  ({12h00m},delay(60.,single("/my/jingle.mp3")),
  ...
])
radio = fallback(track_sensitive=false,[timed_promotions,radio],transitions=[final_fade,out_fade])

that's only anexample, but you can do a lot of thing with liquidsoap (and i'm not a masterchief of liquidsoap ;)

Rick Munday

I am far from a liquidsoap expert but I can take a look at it sometime. My thought on this is that users shouldn't have to delve into programming to fix something... we're not code monkeys
:(|)

Albert FR

I'm agree with you :(|)
But it's an open source project, if you want you can help it
or you can ask to the airtime team (they can do that for you for some money)
or do like us for the moment.
waiting...

Josh McLain

Rick Munday said:
Is there a minimum time length for tracks? i.e. Station ID's? We could always add in a couple promos or something to fill voids.

There is no minimum length for tracks, you could have a 3 second spot between tracks if you wanted.

Are there plans to have sub folders under the tracks listing on playlist builder?

Currently there are not.

-Josh

Rick Munday

Hmm, OK. That could make it interesting to sort through all the uploads (i.e. genre of music, promos, news and shows).

I'm aware there's a search function but wow.

On any given day we could have playout of 160+ files between all the item types. Currently we use SAM and ZaraRadio and we've gotten them trained to grab files from the appropriate folders and adding them to the playlist as they go. If there all in one "folder", so to speak, I can see some wide margins of error factoring in.

Josh McLain

Currently the best way to sort out promos, news, and shows are to tag them in the album field of their ID3 tag and to sort or search that way. I realize that doesn't take care of genre, but it should help with the other tracks.

-Josh

Rick Munday

That's an interesting work around. Will keep it in mind. Thanks!

Paul Baranowski

@Rick said: Are there plans to have sub folders under the tracks listing on playlist builder?

@Josh said: Currently there are not.

This isn't correct, as we will have a way to tag audio files in the future.

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