Typed, manual playlist entry in Airtime for shows where hosts play CDs, records, etc.?? - Airtime Development Discussions on Sourcefabric Forum

Sean Dennis

Hi. I am a volunteer co-manager at Asheville Free Media - http://www.ashevillefm.org . We are considering migrating away from Drupal for various reasons. Airtime looks great, but can it provide a function for the creation of playlists in circumstances where the DJ is playing music from CDs and LPs and thus needs to manually type in each song and artist as they are being aired? The majority of our DJs bring in music of their own as well as use the music in our library of CDs. The functionality we need would be where a DJ logs in, creates a new blank playlist, and then types in each song as he or she plays it, with the currently-playing title displayed on the website front page. Then, when the show is over, the DJ should be able to save the playlist and have it linked to the webpage for his or her show, along with the archived audio file.

Has anyone developed a hack or plug-in that would facilitate this type of playlist generation? If not, what might a developer charge to custom code something like this? We are a non-profit and don't have much money.

Thanks,

Sean

Romeo

It's a very time consuming for DJ to create such type of playlists each time. And there're at least two issues here. First - you never know how long this or that track will be on air because DJ decides when to mix-in or mix out certain track. The second - very often DJ decides what to play next during the current song. You never know what will sound better before the show starts.

So, opposite to prepared blank playlist with meta, it will be better to have a metadata update feature during live show. Say, DJ puts his favorite LP, then goes to Airtime and enters Title, Artist, Label, etc. and Airtime updates streams metadata with this info.

Sean Dennis

Thanks Romeo. Would there be a way to also save these metadata entries as a webpage and store the information in whatever database Airtime uses? For example, here is the playlist for my show that happened yesterday - http://www.ashevillefm.org/node/3873

It is nice to have these pages since listeners can learn more about a show by seeing prior show playlists.

The other thing is that we currently pull song/album/artist/label data from the Drupal database for reporting purposes to the music royalty organizations - SoundExchange, SESAC, BMI. Unless the metadata is stored elsewhere in Airtime I do not know how we could create the needed reports.

Thanks in advance for your reply! Sean

Sean Dennis

And yes, you are exactly right. Many of our DJs will decide what to play next based on the prior song.

Sean Dennis

I guess there is not much interest in this feature where DJs are doing live shows and need to log their songs in a playlist one at a time as they go?

Paul Baranowski

You are the first one to request that.

I don't think we would implement this anytime soon, your best bet is to figure out a way to implement it yourself. A less manually-intensive way to do it is to get a program that can identify songs automatically and log the song that way.

Daniel James · Post edited by Daniel James at 2012-01-11 07:28:35

Hi Sean, we have a ticket open for this feature, which you can vote on and add your comments to here:

http://dev.sourcefabric.org/browse/CC-2391

In the meantime you might like to consider the http://www.radioactivity.fm/ service, which is not very expensive.

Automatic song recognition is fine in theory, but it won't work for the very fresh or obscure material that specialist DJs like to play. Nor will it work for local bands whose songs are not in the catalogue of the major labels. I have my doubts that it would work for live DJ mixes either, where white label records are played for just a few seconds, or one on top of the other.

Cheers!

Daniel

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