A lot of the daily programs we carry are automated in our current environment. i.e. downloaded, renamed and copied into the correct playout folder.
Could we change that to the "watched" folder and have it automatically played in an existing playlist?
Script fetches dn2011-1209-1.mp3 from a remote host, renames it democracynow.mp3
Script moves it to the "watched" folder
Airtime grabs it and moves it into the appropriate subfolder
If we built a playlist for Monday through Friday and 12:00PM to play the file democracynow.mp3, would the above hold true? i.e. the daily democracynow.mp3 file is replaced as part of the watched folder import process or are they incrementally named?
It should work if you are moving the file to the "watched" folder. I'm not sure if you are copying it to "real watched" folder or copying it to "organize"(/srv/airtime/stor/organize by default) folder. I'm suspecting you copied to "organize" folder, because your comment #3. If a file is copied to watched folder, airtime doesn't move it to anywhere. It only organizes it when files are copied to organize directory. Can you please try to do it under "watched" directory?
Posts: 389Member, Administrator, Sourcefabric Team
Hi Rick - This use case of overwriting an existing file and preserving your playlist is handled in 2.1. You can even try it out now if you want to grab the latest GIT "devel" branch. - Paul
OK, so yeah... Putting today's file in the watched folder didn't actually work.
There's a playlist for Friday (when I created the event) and even though the calendar entries are there for this week, there is no playlist associated with the subsequent events.
@Paul Baranowski - Does the 2.1 version work correctly? i.e. the scheduled Calendar and playlist continue correctly? Not sure I want to jump that far ahead but it'd sure beat daily updates for standard programming.
Posts: 389Member, Administrator, Sourcefabric Team
2.1 is in heavy development, I think playout is currently broken on it. It should only be used for testing purposes on a separate machine from your existing production server. You might want to wait until we start releasing betas before you give it a test.
Hey, Any update on this?? Im looking for the same answer. I thought that if i put a file in a watched folder, that it would be auto updated-downloaded. example: everyday i want to run the Joe Show at 1pm... so i enter joeshow.mp3 into the playlist, and schedule it everyday. and have my host ftp his mp3 everyday named joeshow.mp3. does it overwrite the file and auto import it into the playlist?? if not, is there a way to set this up? i thought this was the point of watched folders! Launching a new talk station on monday and was kinda depending on this feature
And I agree, that's the way we've always done "watched" folders with other automation systems. Not a big deal for now, but it's definitely a "gotta have" function.
A lot of our "dailies" are constant filename and just dumped into a folder on the network and the current systems pick it up from there so expanding this as a native function in Airtime just makes sense.
For us I envision the production machines running Ubuntu Studio and just dropping the completed production files into a folder that's an SCP shortcut to the watched folder on the Airtime server and Airtime picks it up at the appropriate scheduled time per the playlist and it works perfectly.