Scheduling Problem

I just took over the manager position of an LPFM run by a Christian college in the panhandle of Florida, and I'm still getting used to the Raduga and AirList software.

We use a simple rotation schedule that consists of three categories: "Radio Play," a "Top 20" that consists of songs that get played more often, and "IDs." We make an hour rotation with that, and repeat the rotation 24 times to get a daily playlist.

Now, I need to set aside one hour a day to play Southern Gospel music that's contained in a different folder. Since this station is almost completely automated, I'd like for it to rearrange and shuffle the music on its own. I want the playlist to start exactly on the hour, interrupting whatever is happening, and then to end exactly on the hour, being interrupted by whatever comes next.

My problem is that right now, we disregard the timing in the playlists created by AirList. We simply have AirList make a Monday list, Tuesday list, etc., each one enough for 24 hours, and we have Raduga use a scheduled event to open up the next day's list at midnight (it's a sloppy system that I inherited from my predecessor).

I tried to use one of the hour rotations for the Southern Gospel Hour, but during our shows, etc. we pause the playlist, and it doesn't look as if there's any automatic correction. Also, we receive a satellite signal for syndicated shows, and we have thirty minute pauses as scheduled events so that a silence detector switches to the satellite signal, throwing off the list even further.

I guess the best way that I could do it to be compatible with our current, flawed system is to get AirList to make five randomized playlists, each an hour long, for each day of the week, and have Raduga scheduled to open them up as an event. The problem with that is that after it's over, Raduga starts the daily playlist from the beginning again.

I wouldn't mind completely overhauling the way we schedule our playlists, but I don't know how to make it work with the pauses we utilize for programs. Any ideas for this problem?

Re: Scheduling Problem

In addition to your 3 categories you could create a "Gospel" category and let AirList choose the gospel songs from that category for the Gospel rotation that you schedule at special hours.

I don't know how you currently load the hourly playlist generated by AirList. But I recommend you to try the AutoPlaylist for that task: http://www.wolosoft.com/en/raduga/tools.html#Autoplaylist .

Tick the "Run Immediately" checkbox for the AutoPlaylist.vbs event if you want the new playlsit to interrupt whatever was playing before. This will automatically bring the program in sync at the top of each hour even if it was previously interrupted by manual intervention.

Re: Scheduling Problem

I did exactly what you said. I switched from a daily playlist to an hourly one, and started using AutoPlaylist. It all works like a charm. Thanks!