Dated Programs with multiple parts...

[MetroEast IT]

Thought I'd get some advice on best practices.  And I'm thinking I may already have answered my own question, but here it is.

What's the best way to deal with 2 or 3 part programs, pulled by date? I'm looking at using 2 or 3 lists per show...  and scheduling the blocks literally, using the list appropriate for the part.  Gets a bit ugly real fast, but would be solid.

Seems like the play count could work, but what about depending on the list order?  Could we list the parts to sort by title, and have the script pull all parts from the same list?  Maybe using unique could work.

What do you suggest?  (We'll be scheduling a few long format shows in hour blocks, with id/promo breaks.)

[Lane]

I'm in the middle of working out something similar myself right now.

As far as having this play in order. If you do not select random, a fill will choose items *in order* from a playlist. So you can easily have a playlist for the show, or a separate playlist for each portion of the show.  I'm doing it where a one hour show will have 4 segments. A playlist for each segment. Items in the order they play. Each segment is required to be approximately 12.5 minutes long, but can vary from 10 to 15 minutes, provided the total comes out to 50 minutes. 

For each fill, I'm careful to set the minimum time to where it exceeds the expected end time of that segment, and to have random off, and unique items on. In this way, it will grab each item from the playlist in order, and use them all up without repeating any of them.

The schedule for this hour puts some of my things in around these segments.  It ends up something like this:

fill to top of hour in case there is a shortfall
top of hour tone
station ID
announcements or news
spot (for an ad)
pick for a show intro theme ( I don't put this in with the show segments. a time saver )
fill show segment 1 (this contains voice tracks and music, or whatever, last voice track mentions the break)
pick or spot here for an ad or whatever. I could put a few picks/spots in a row if needed.
fill show segment 2 (as before, this segments contains voicetracks/music, whatever)
pick or spot
fill show segment 3
pick or spot
fill show segment 4 ( the last voice track in this one closes the show )
pick for a show closer theme (again, I don't have this part of the show segments )

In my case, I'm doing this because someone out of studio is preparing these show segments. I have them order them properly, and put the episode number and segment number in the comments. They burn this to a CD and give it to me. I import the CD in to the stations itunes, add the segments to the show segments playlists, and it's ready to roll.

I also have them give me a print out of the order for me to check against, in case of problems.

My tests of this are working out so far. I need to look at seeing if I can stack up a month worth of shows, or even a whole season of shows in advance. As it is, I can have several weeks imported in advance, and merely need to add each show to the playlist manually in advance each week. Not too much work, but forgetting would mean a repeat. If I could fully automate an entire season, that would be swell. I haven't figured out a way within iTunes/Scheduler, but it's possible I could write an applescript routine that would cycle them for me automatically. I may yet look into that.

Actually, I already have an applescript routine I could use, now that I think about it. I control community announcements through such a script. I put a date range into the grouping field, and run a script nightly that checks the range, and add or removes the word 'valid' to/from the tracks.  So I could make a smart list that checks for valid, and for the segment number in the comments, and adds those tracks to the right show segment.

I'm pretty sure I've posted that script on this site, if you want it.

Long winded, but i hope it was useful.

[Jay Lichtenauer]

I had an idea but I needed to make some modifications to Scheduler for it to work. So what I'm describing here only works in 2011.10.2b1 or higher.
http://macinmind.com/RadiologikSchedulerbeta.zip

If you put dates in the titles of your like '2011-10-21' and you use the date command, it can work like the pick command with random off so that it chooses all tracks with that date in them and in playlist order. The idea here is you could program orderly tracks for specific days all in the same iTunes playlist.

So the changes I needed to make were to make the date commands work more like the pick command instead of the fill command. Also I had to make sure it choose in playlist order like picks and fills do. This is all done in 2011.10.2b1 and higher.

[Lane]

That sounds useful, except I'm not personally going to put the date in the song titles for a voice tracked show. There are a few reasons for this. One being that I put songs in a show, and also use those same songs in regular rotation.  Just don't want to muck up the titles. And I will also repeat a show within a week on a different day and time, which would need a different date. It would be more appropriate to use this if the segment was a continuous recording, but I don't do that when songs are included so they log properly, which is needed for royalty reporting.

A way to date match a playlist might be useful. thinking .... what fantasy function would let me fully automate a bunch of playlists to play on a certain date? .... yeah, I guess if i could put the date in the playlist, and the playlist choices showed something like "[date match] whatever playlist name". If there were several playlists with identical names, except for the date, those would all just show up once in the playlist list.

I could have playlists named "2011-10-28 Comedy Show", "2011-11-03 Comedy Show", etc.  and in the list I'd see "[date match] Comedy show"

Now, instead of doing that in playlist selection, if I had a separate pane to build a show and save it, that I could later load it to play on that date. And in that case, if Load could match a date, I'd have the same thing.  More steps, but I could time the show out exactly if built in DJ in this fictitious builder pane. I could say, import a playlist in the show builder pane, make adjustments as necessary, save out the program with a date in it's name.

Food for thought. I've mentioned before the desire to have a Builder pane where I can make shows in advance where specific tracks need to be chosen. If they could be date coded, even better.  The applescript routines I have fill that gap well enough, although I'm not able to precisely time out a show. I just live with that.

[MetroEast IT]

The sequential pick adjustment sounds like it will address our issue.  Right now, we've got 120m program scripts that look like this:
pick               KZME Special Message      None      
pick            i   Legal Station IDs      None      
pick            ruh   StationIDs1071fm      None      
spot            1               
pick            ruh   StationIDs      None      
date               Dated Show      None      
pick            f   Evergreen Show      None      
pick            i   Legal Station IDs      None      
pick            ruh   StationIDs1071fm      None      
spot            1               
pick            ruh   StationIDs      None      
date            u   Dated Show      None      
pick            fu   Evergreen Show      None      
fill      119:30   120:00   ruh   StationIDs1071fm      None      

The "Dated" and "Evergreen" lists are manual lists, where I've dragged the 2 parts to be listed in play order.  Checking the log, I'm now certain this only fails to work as expected, when there are no date files that match.  So the pick work in order, and the date match fails on the unique.  When it 'fails', the result is to have part 1 from "Dated" for hour 1, and part 1 from "Evergreen" for hour 2.  I've been manually correcting the 2nd hour in those cases.

Here's that the log looks like when this happens:
1st hour:
Line 6      date Dated Show
            2 tracks found with date match
(07:01:19)  Added /Path/To/Dated hr 1.mp3

2nd hour:
Line 12     date u Dated Show
            2 tracks found with date match
Line 12     *****Excessive failures finding qualifying tracks, exiting this script line (date u Dated Show)
Line 13     pick fu Evergreen Show
(08:01:19)  Added /Path/To/Evergreen hr 1.mp3

Not sure why the log is saying too many failures.  I can see that the rules match 2 tracks by date.  I thought this might be a glitch.  Without unique, the date rule will pull the first track (consistently, several times while testing this.)

Again, the pick (failover step) works fine.

[Jay Lichtenauer]

That error looks like exactly what I thought I addressed in the beta. Sorry, it isn't clear: Are you using the beta?

[MetroEast IT]

No I haven't, my apologies.  I will give the beta a go tomorrow.  Thanks Jay!

[MetroEast IT]

Jay, I'm please to report that the dated 2 part shows within a 120m block are working fine now.

I have part 2 set to pull unique, dated...  I also have evergreen fall back rules, but haven't had another example to test on.

I could create some test files to be sure, but time is running short for today.  Maybe next week.

Again, my thanks to you.  Great software!  Great support!