How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

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marckxz
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How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by marckxz »

I created a script
1. news
2. song 1
3. song 2
4. song 3
...
exec. mode is sequential
In that script is one fixed element: the top of the hour-jingle
What I want to do is: top of the hour, followed by the news and another hour of songs.
Unfortunatly, sometimes, the newsfile is in the middle of an hour, at the end or somewhere else. How can I achieve that the script is start all over again every hour, so the news comes first.

Sometimes the scheduler schedules 2 jingles after each other.
This is my set up:
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Farbo
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Re: How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by Farbo »

Hi. If I can help I would suggest:

1. create completely new script "news"
2. initial track will be top of the hour jingle (if it is always only and the same track)
3. define entries of your news which should go one after another

4. Define new program in program scheduler with fix start (if you want to start it right at the top of the hour) or you can define it as soft start (if you want to wait until the currently tracks is finished). Depends what you want.
5. define in this program entry it should be played as overlay as one cycle overlay. Thus you will achieve your regular hour script or even 24 hour script for music tracks are played but at the top of the hour news script is started. After news script is finished, your regular script will continue to play.
6. of course delete fixtime element (top hour jingle) from your regular script.

There are also other ways of doing it. This is one of possibilities. If you could read old forum, you would find one issue I raised regarding news. :-(

Bernd, did I forget something? :-) Hopefully not.
Peter
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radio42
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Re: How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by radio42 »

If I understand you correctly you want to have a pure 'hourly' program, meaning the sequence would for each hour be:
1. Top-Of-The-Hour-Jingle
2. News
3. Song1
4. Song2
... SongX...until the next hour starts.

To achieve this you can create a single Script exactly line this with the following lines:
1. LoadTrack, Top-Of-The-Hour-Jingle, Count=1, Option=SupressHistoryCheck, SupressAddHistory
2. LoadTrack, News, Count=1, Option=SupressHistoryCheck, SupressAddHistory
3. Random, MediaLib, Count=1
4. Random, MediaLib, Count=1
...
Set the LoopLine parameter in the script to 3!
No FTEs etc. needed!

Now you might create (within the Program Scheduler) a program entry for each hour!
E.g. a single entry with the recurrence pattern "Hourly, every 1 hour" would also do its job.
Now assign the above script to that program.
As the StartType of the program you might either define:
Fixed: When a 'Fixed' start is specified the program will start at exactly this time and any currently playing track will be stopped immediately.
Soft: In case of 'Soft' start, the remaining playtime of a currently playing track will be evaluated. If the remaining playtime is less than the given Maximum Delay the track will play til the end until this program is started. If the remaining time is bigger than the Maximum Delay the track is stopped immediately and the program starts on time.
Fixed/Soft TimeUpdateSync: Instead of starting the program in a new playlist window any existing scheduler playlist window will be reused and a TimeUpdateSync entry is used to change the running script.
(see here for details: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=10)

What now happens is the following:
At each hour a new program is started (actually the same script in this simple example).
This will now execute the script, starting with the Top-Of-The-Hour-Jingle, followed by the News and followed by the Songs.
Note, that a script is (within this hour) being looped, once all script-lines have been used.
That's why you should set the LoopLine value to 3 - so that the first 2 lines are not repeated (Jingle and News).

I also noticed, that you have defined a Song-History value with your script.
Don't do so. Leave that to 0. Same for the Media Lib History (if set). So that 'only' the global song history is used.
That gives you much more predictable results.
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marckxz
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Re: How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by marckxz »

Thank you. That seems to be working fine. Altough, my script start with
1. TOTH-jingle
2. News
3. Stationcall
4. songlib 1
...
loop line is set to 4.
The THOTH-jingle and news is scheduled again, but in overtime.
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radio42
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Re: How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by radio42 »

That indeed looks strange.
How did you came to the 'overtime' situation (how have you defined your program scheduler entry, if it repeats every hour...)?
And did you probably edited or reload the script which was currently used within the playlist?
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marckxz
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Re: How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by marckxz »

radio42 wrote:That indeed looks strange.
How did you came to the 'overtime' situation (how have you defined your program scheduler entry, if it repeats every hour...)?
And did you probably edited or reload the script which was currently used within the playlist?
Yes, I have 1 script that repeats every hour and during testing I edited the script while it was in use.
After restarting the program the issue did not occured again.
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radio42
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Re: How to: play top of the hour, followed by news

Post by radio42 »

That explains it.
When 'editing' a script which is currently running in an active playlist - its internal script-pointer might need to be reset (as the script-lines might have changed, due to your edits).
As such the script might 'restart' from the beginning when you finished editing it - an appropriate dialog must also have been appeared and warned you about this.
This can actually not fully be prevented, as changing a running script is kind of 'critical' and should be avoided.
That's why you explicitly must 'enable' this option in the general settings.

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