Messages

1

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Cascading program shortfalls

« on: May 25, 2013, 12:05:50 PM »

I take advantage of one of the 'warning scripts' Radiologik can run.  When the program is going to run out of content, 30 seconds before that, this script will run:

~/Music/Radiologik/Scripts/ DJEvent-ProgramQueueEmptyIn30Seconds


And here is what i put in it to automatically grab a song and add it to the program.

Code: [Select]

--This Applescript is run by Radiologik DJ when there are only 30 seconds of playtime left before the program queue stops.

--this just logs the event so i know it happened
do shell script "echo \"DJ empty in 30 seconds\" `date` >> ~/Dropbox/DJrestartlog.txt"

-- this grabs a song for DJ
tell application "Radiologik DJ"
QueueiTunesPlaylist "-FM-emergency"
end tell

And the other thing to do is make the first line in all your programs a  Fill with Min of TOTH.  That will fill up the gap should there be one.

That should save you from dead air when an unpredictable event happens. The only time you'll get dead air with that is if there is a pending interrupt that it's waiting in the program to run, or you're playing a silent file.

2

Running a Radio Station / Re: Setting up to go live

« on: May 25, 2013, 08:58:57 AM »

Instead of using soundflower, I recommend you switch nicecast to an audio input, and plug the output of your mixer into it.  That way you'll get zero latency on monitoring and your mic. What you hear will be exactly what the nicecast audience hears.

When you use it to stream an audio input, make sure you lower the volume fader down in nicecast, or you might have a feedback issue.

3

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Exact Programming Times

« on: May 23, 2013, 07:29:37 AM »

Well, that's a huge question.   I'm going to first say watch the videos here: http://www.radiologik.com/

You'll see some things about the scheduler are addressed.

Now I'll mention the basic run through for this sort of thing.

To play music until 15 minutes, you can use a Fill command with a min and max set. i recommend you keep the target window loose. So first try Min of 13:00 and Max of 16:00. You can adjust later, but let's like this.

After that first Fill, add picks as you need for station IDs etc. And then add another Fill for the next block of music. As in, Fill Min 28:00 and Max 31:00.

Now you can add picks again for station IDs etc.

Continue on like this all the way to the two hour point, which is your target length most of the time (where it's longer, do it longer). To finish off at exactly 2 hours, have your last Fill with Min of 120:00 and Max of 120:00. This will cause it to pick a track that ends exactly at that time.

Try getting this working first. If you need to add things, we'll address that later on.

4

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Automaticly downloading and broadcasting the newest files

« on: May 22, 2013, 04:43:29 PM »

You can get your smart playlist to pick the newest one that hasn't been played. You can limit the smart playlist to just one item, and have the order set to 'most recently added'.

You can also do your birdnotes example.

I do something like this with old time radio shows. I have them play out only once each. The smart playlist has a rule for 'plays' which i set to 0. Once the items has it's playcount updated by Radiologik, it disappears from the smart playlist.

5

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Cascading program shortfalls

« on: May 21, 2013, 05:10:14 PM »

I don't have enough information to understand what happened to the democracy now item not showing up. Let's first address the fill alternative.

A fill has a minimum and maximum value.  Once those are met, it considered finished. If you have a min of :30 and a max of 59:00, it's likely to hit that wide target pretty much immediately. Remember to think of it as a target window. If you want it to fill all the way to the end of the hour, make the target window small, and near where you want it to play until.  Try something more like min 57:00 and max 59:00. Adjust those numbers to best first your music selection.  That example should give you between 1 and 3 minutes to the top of the hour. I recommend you to through all your schedules and look for Fills with very wide target windows for min and max and tighten them up.

Most of the later stuff in your post won't happen if you fix that one thing.

What I always do for the first item in any playlist is use a Fill to TOTH (you have a pick), where I typically have the previous hour fall short around 3 minutes on purpose. That Fill typically puts in the last song, and then I have my legal IDs and such run. If it needs to put in more than one item to fill it up, it will. A pick only lets you add one item.

Now about that file not playing. I guess you have itunes set to keep only the most recent one. I don't think I've experienced the issue where scheduler read the itunes xml file, and got old information, but I agree it's behaving like that, where the xml reported the previous day info, and that item was now deleted by itunes. I have old time radio shows that would be repeating if it got old xml info, and that's never happened. Do you have the itunes database on an external drive that can spin down? I'm scratching my head as to how that could happen. I suppose there could be a 'coincidence' thing, where you caught the moment between a download finishing and the itunes xml getting updated. There is a lag between events happening and the xml getting updated, although not a big one. Could just be back luck. Allowing more time for the download might be the prudent thing here.

6

Running a Radio Station / Re: Building programs 4 to 6 hours in advance

« on: May 19, 2013, 08:21:22 AM »

Trying to do this is at odds with ever having newer content scheduled. It simply doesn't work that way. If you're going to have news/weather etc., you really really want to run it hourly. I recommend you spend time learning what you can do in this mode. If it's a music only station, it can make more sense to do that. 

Your PD is probably concerned about what music will be scheduled, and that is more determined by iTunes itself with it's playlists and smart playlists, and is where he should concentrate his attention. It's important to remember the Scheduler doesn't operate on it's own. It works in concert with iTunes, where iTunes can decide quite a lot about available music selections, and can even determine song order where your PD has hand sorted songs if he wished.

Radiologik is probably different from what your PD is used to. It's not uncommon for people new to it to try and shoe horn it into behaving like older more familiar systems. As they learn it better, they come to understand the advantages of how it works and embrace it's way or working. I'd like to invite your PD to come here and ask questions. If we can identify what he really needs to know, I'm sure I can provide advice on how to achieve it.  I doubt it's merely that he wants to see a long list of songs scheduled, I think it's likely that's the way he's used to vetting what goes out on air to satisfy a variety of concerns. I'd like to talk with him about those concerns.

7

Call for help - Radiologik / Re: building multiple hours for review by program director

« on: May 17, 2013, 01:12:05 PM »

Sounds like you do things a lot like the way I do things Trace.  I have many playlists that are not directly called by Radiologik, but instead feed into other lists that do. I also use Folders of lists in a similar way.

Lately, I've been using the rotated playlists feature to do shows. I used to use program bundles in Radiologik for this, but find playlists in itunes a little easier to deal with. And I'll voice track them that way too. I'll load up those playlists in a second instance of Radiologik just to check that ramp times and other track properties are set so I get a nice crossfade in the voice tracks etc. And I can preview the show that way too.

8

Call for help - Radiologik / Re: building multiple hours for review by program director

« on: May 17, 2013, 09:25:22 AM »

The scheduler can do up to 6 hours at a time for a single program.

There is another way to deal with this. The PD can build playlists of songs in iTunes that can be pulled from when each hourly schedule runs.

I'm going to recommend that at first you do lots of testing with Radiologik in it's hourly mode so you can really get to know how it works. Experience being the best teacher here. Radiologik works to not duplicate what already exists in iTunes in terms of playlist management, instead providing functions on top of that needed by radio automation. So really knowing itunes well is important to getting the most out of Radiologik. Your PD will likely benefit more from managing playlists in the iTunes end of things, knowing that Radiologik can pull from those playlists, mark them as played, and continue on. An area to really know well in iTunes is the 'smart playlists', which can pull items out that have played recently and control the final music list in a variety of other ways as well.

9

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Avoiding song artists but not Voice-over/Jingle artists

« on: May 15, 2013, 10:33:37 PM »

probably not fair to imply other canadians are as careless with language.

glad you're sorted!

10

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Avoiding song artists but not Voice-over/Jingle artists

« on: May 15, 2013, 10:45:16 AM »

ug. bad english on my part. have unique checked.

i tend to say check off, as in a pre-flight checklist, where you check off items checked. my bad.

11

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Avoiding song artists but not Voice-over/Jingle artists

« on: May 14, 2013, 07:39:52 PM »

you shouldn't use hour avoidance for this. it will cause too many problems, like the one you mention about playing in the same hour in the previous week.

to stop them from playing twice in the same hour, check off the unique tracks option.

12

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Avoiding song artists but not Voice-over/Jingle artists

« on: May 14, 2013, 05:35:56 PM »

I'm unclear what you're saying at this point. hour avoidance shouldn't be checked on the voice overs and jingles. Are you saying it's not checked, but it's failing them based on that?

13

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Exporting Week View Calender for posting on website

« on: May 07, 2013, 04:29:40 PM »

I don't know of a way. But I've also never tried to figure out a way, as I really want different info in each of those.

14

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Radiologik Scheduler 2013.4.1 Extremely Delays Scheduling

« on: April 25, 2013, 04:47:24 PM »

It looks like it's stuck on trying to read the queue end time for the program in Radiologik DJ.  Someone else reported the same thing here. http://radiologikusers.com/community/index.php?topic=838

I haven't been able to duplicate it, and I don't know if Jay has been able to either. You may wish to email him directly at jay [at] macinmind.com so he can ask for very specific information.  If you get it sorted out, and update here would be great.

15

Call for help - Scheduler / Re: Radiologik Scheduler 2013.4.1 Extremely Delays Scheduling

« on: April 25, 2013, 04:10:02 PM »

Hi Sotiris,

A little more information would be helpful. What OS version are you using? What version of iTunes are you running?  Perhaps you could post the log from the scheduler where it showed the delay. At some point, it should have been waiting on something. That log should show what it was waiting on.

I'm trying to duplicate this issue here, but I'm not experiencing it. Any extra information you could provide would help a lot. Thanks.