Winamp Rotation Clock

[jro]

Yes, you are right Chris, about starting a new thread, so here it goes. I just copied and pasted the questions from yesterday.

Thanks Chris. I did some testing and I finally got it to work. I'm wondering a few things:

1. When you type in the time to cue a file, do you have to do this with each file to fill an hour? If you do, then I'm assuming that you would have to take when the first file is finished, add the lenght of the next file to figure out when to cue it and so on; or is there another way of doing this.

2. I noticed that if you cue a file for say 14:00:00 and it is 3:30 long. Then if you cue a file for 14:02:30, it shows up in the playlist but waits until the current file is finished before it starts. Mind you I'm using SqrSoft advanced crossfader, so that could be the reason. Do you have to put the cue time in for each file?

3. If I want to setup several hours of music/announcements, but I want say at the top of the hour what time it is, how do I know how much time I've used in each hour to figure out how to fill it up. The playlist tells me this as I add songs from the media list. Is there a way to figure this out in the play list and then cue the playlist for that hour?

I appreciate your help.

John

[siebe83]

This all sounds really cool. But what exactly are you talking about? Some plugin? If so, could you provide a link? Or is this about some feature in the JTFE plugin by DrO? (haven't seen him lately, btw...)

[billyvnilly]

@siebe Its a plugin request/feature that jro and chris diack are talking about in the jtfe thread here

[Chris Diack]

To recap, this discussion developed due to the fact that Dr.O is refining a "Timed Event" or more correctly "Play at Time" component into the JTFE plugin in Winamp 5.03.

What pushes my buttons regarding this development is being able to insert audio files into a currently running list of audio at a specific time (and in my case to be able to enqueue it rather than have it play immediately).

We operate a Low Power FM radio station and have a need to be able to insert, for instance, an FTP downloaded news bulletin into a currently running playlist and then continue with the playlist, (or in our case we would like to be able to jump forward in the playlist to a given file to start the next hours programming).

We program our station in 24 hour blocks with say 3 different "clocks" to take care of changing listener preferences depending on the time of the day or night, but essentially daytime programming say from 6am to 6pm will be somewhat agressive with a greater amount of promo and sponsorship information than the rest of the day, 6pm to midnight is very "back to back" music oriented, and midnight to dawn is more easy listening with a higher degree of gold programming.

Within any block, eg. 6am to 6pm, every hour is structured similarly with jingles inserted at specific times, likewise sponsor messages, promo's and a fairly rigid format of a strong identifiable song to start each hour and strategically placed current, popular, and oldie material programmed into each hour according to our anecdotal research.

We perhaps differ from some stations, however, in that we use no random programming whatsoever.

Each hour is very similar in structure so we have a strong identifiability with our target audience, (in our case contemporary country music), which helps us attain a very high cume (Country music has a very high degree of polarisation our market... You love it or hate it with a passion)

While all this sounds very dedicated and strategic, we need to be able to complete the picture with current news and sports related bulletins into our programming at the top of the hour and John, who has kindly started this thread on our behalf may be interested in how we deal with the top of the hour issue.

We have decided that it's nigh on impossible to program any given hour with the correct amount of material to occupy exactly 60 minutes, so we compromise (nasty word in radio programming)

We average out the duration of every single song which is 3 minutes and 35 seconds.

We assume (decided) that our listeneres do not wish to hear a news bulletin any earlier that 90 seconds to the hour so we program Winamp Rotation Clock to enqueue the News sounder, News bulletin, Sports sounder, Sports bulletin, and outro at HH:58:30.

Winamp Rotation Clock is instructed to play an .m3u file, which takes care of all the above components in a single hit, rather than each component individually and this simplifies the process of "Top of the hour" programming as well as we can.

The only situation we cannot deal to currently is to drop down the playlist to the next "hour starter" program element, which is perceived to be high priority as we have had say 4 minutes of spoken material and the lovers of music are getting itchy feet, so we hit them with a very strong, highly identifiable song to start the new hour with.

This is not rocket science as it's fairly much the strategy of most strategically programmed radio stations.

John, in the light of the overly long post, I hope this gives you some ideas into solving your issues, eg. programming .m3u files rather than .mp3 files... simplifies the "programming in blocks" process.

Also John, I know of no way, so far, to program a voice announcement into a playlist via WRC or anything else, which will satisfactorly enqueue and be played at a specific time without crashing over a currently playing track.

My policy, is the lesser of many evils, and where necessary, program a voice break which contains a time check at a non critical part of the hour and make it something like "it's a quarter past the hour" or "We've got news in around ten minutes at the top of the hour" sorta like Bloomberg Television fudges the time "ID's"

Does it help?

Chris in New Zealand

[jro]

I have been able to use audacity to record voice announcements and save them as .mp3.

My main purpose for all this is to broadcast announcments and music over a PA system as well as our LPFM transmitter for our annual fair. I have previously burned my announcements to CD and used a player for this purpose. This year, I thought I would try to use my computer and if it made life easier, the Winamp Rotation Clock. Basically it would be completely automated.

Chris, yesterday I was able to cue files including a voice recorded mp3 and everything worked fine. You answered one of my questions regarding the calculating of the amount of time in an hour. I have an idea, so I'll try it and let you know how I make out.

By the way, excuse my ignorance here, but what is a .m3u file? If I understood that, It may answer some other questions bouncing around in my head.

Thanks
John

[jro]

Chris, never mind the .m3u file question, I found out what it is by testing an idea. I used winamp's playlist to come up with a 20 minute run. It started about 7 seconds late and skipped the first selection in the playlist. At first I thought it was because it was a voice recording. So I tried another test by putting a song at the beginning and it did the same thing.

Just did another test and I believe the reason the 5 - 7 second delay was because of the Sound Solution Plug-In I was trying. I unpluged it and did another test and it started right at the time I wanted but it still skipped the first selection. Ever see anything like that before or know why it skips the first selection?

I believe I could save a bunch of playlists for each hour of each day and have it work quite well as long as I knew how to fix the skipping of the first selection.

Another question, what are the benefits to the other Hourly, Weekly and Single selections? I did all my tests on the Daily selection.

A side subject since you mentioned your radio format, I imagine there's lots of Keith Urban fans down your way even though he's Austrailian

I appreciate your help again
John

[Chris Diack]

http://countrymusic.about.com/od/kei...blprkurban.htm

Hi John... Were you winding me up... hehe. Hows it going with the previous discussions re LPFM?

Chris in New Zealand

[jro]

I guess there is a lesson to be learned ... Don't always believe what you hear. Anytime Keith is on the radio, the announcers always say he is from Australia.

Since it's been a year and a half since my last post, I tried the clock in 2004 and it worked pretty good. This past year I tried some things and it worked even better. I only use it 4 days out of the year, so it does the job for me. Thanks for your help on using it.

John