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Frequently Asked Questions |
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More detailed information is available in the full online help documentation included with the trial editions of the software, available from the Download page. |
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General Answers |
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Creator Related Answers |
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Creator is a music/spot scheduler. It basically selects audio files based on your specifications and writes the filenames to playlist files. Playlists are usually generated daily or weekly. The structure of the playlist files may be
altered to suit the audio player application that will be reading them.
Playlist files may be loaded into audio players such as Winamp, Windows
Media Player etc, or loaded by proper radio broadcasting playout software,
including our own Studio software. |
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With Creator, you are able to design the structure of every hour of the day. Hourly rotations are defined by selecting a mixture of music categories and spot groups. Each category may be a different genre of music, tempo, age, etc, so you can, for example, inhibit two fast rock 90's songs from playing consecutively. Different days of the week, or hours of the day, often require a different format. Once the structure has been defined, Creator can generate playlists week after week with no maintenance required, unless spots such as advertisements need to be added or removed. Creator can also schedule spot groups (advertisements, jingles, stations ID's etc) to play at specific times when used with compatible playback/automation software, such as StationPlaylist Studio. Creator has many other features such as •
song and artist repeat protection so the same songs, or songs by the same
artist are not played too close together •
creates an interactive web based playlist for the entire week for your
DJ's or listeners to see what's coming up •
generates a summary of all selected songs for royalty payment purposes •
and a summary of spots for billing purposes •
and many more features (see the
Products
page). |
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Voice Tracking (only available in Creator Pro) provides a way to easily and quickly record and insert voice announcements into the playlist at manual or pre-determined positions in the playlist. This makes your station sound live when unattended. Voice tracking provides a way for a DJ to pre-record an entire show within a few minutes, allowing more time to do other things, or simply leave the studio. StationPlaylist Studio Pro supports
playing voice tracks simultaneously with the beginning of the next song,
so this combination provides a seamless "live" show for the listener. |
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How do Voice Intro's and Outro's work? Voice Intro's and Outro's may be recorded for individual songs or artists. When a song is selected, an optional intro or outro matching the song or artist may be accompanied in the selection. This feature initially requires some investment in time to record the announcements, but the station can sound live in an automated situation with no voice tracking required. As with Voice Tracking (above), Voice
Intro's may also be overlapped with the beginning the of song when using
Studio Pro for the playback automation software. |
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A Category is a list of music audio files which are related to a particular genre, tempo, age, or whatever criteria you like. The more categories that are defined, the more control you have over the structure of each hour (rotation). Category items (tracks) are generally selected randomly, whereas spot group items are generally selected sequentially (alphabetically). Audio files may be specified individually
in each category, however, we suggest that all music files in each
category are moved into their own folders on the hard drive. ie.
Each category relates to a folder. This is recommended for two
reasons. Categories are used in
rotations. |
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A Spot Group is usually a group of jingles, an advertisement, or a group of station ID's etc. They are also often used for lengthy programmes such as a weekly programme of interviews, etc. Spot Group items (tracks) are normally selected sequentially in alphabetical order, whereas category items are normally selected randomly. Like Categories, Spot Groups may be added to
rotations, but may also be set up as Timed Spots where they are scheduled
for a specific time. |
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A rotation is made up of a list of categories and spot groups which add up to roughly 60 minutes of play time. Here is a shortened example of a possible rotation:
When a playlist is created, an item is
selected randomly from each category, and sequentially from each spot group. Many different rotations may be defined for different
hours of the day. The hours and days where a rotation will be used
is defined in a schedule. Other types of entries are also
possible in a rotation such as voice track markers and break notes. |
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A schedule defines which
rotations will be used in each of the 24 hours of a day.
Multiple schedules may be created for different days of the week, or one
schedule may be used for all 7 days. Multiple schedules provide
for different station formats on different days of the week. |
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How do I schedule advertisements?
Creator is primarily a music and jingle scheduler.
It is not specifically designed to schedule commercials, although many
successfully use Creator to schedule commercials.
Traffic/billing schedulers are dedicated to scheduling commercials and also provide a client billing facility. These can save a lot of time, particularly when many advertisers are involved, and when each client wants their ads scheduled at specific times of the day. Creator Pro integrates with 3rd party traffic schedulers, using the Traffic Importer in the Playlist Editor. Each user seems to adopt their own system of scheduling commercials with Creator. Here are some of them.
Random Method
This method can be the easiest to setup and manage, providing you have a limited range of advertising packages, and advertisers do not dictate when their ads will be scheduled. Place all the commercials in one large folder on the hard drive and create one spot group for this folder. Set the Sort Type to Randomly. If you have say 2 or 3 different advertising packages with a different amount of placements per day, create 2 or 3 spot groups instead of 1. Now schedule the spot group in your rotation(s). For example, if you have 4 advertisements that need to be played 6 times over a 12 hour period, 2 ads per hour must be scheduled in the rotation... 6 Per Day Ads This method is very easy to set up and manage provided the number of ads in each spot group are kept at a constant number. When an advertisement finishes, either add a new advertisement to replace it, or add a fill in jingle or ad for your own programmes. This does not then require changes to the rotations. But If additional ads need to be added to this group, the rotation will need to be modified to include an extra ad per hour (to handle 6 advertisers), or a new commercial break at a different time of the hour. Only a small number of rotations may be required using this method, perhaps only 1 rotation, and the spot group, rotations, and schedules should not need regular adjustments from day to day. Block Method
This method requires one spot group for each
commercial break. This provides full control over what is
played when, and allows the number of commercials in the commercial
break to vary from one day to the next, without the need to adjust
the rotations or schedules on a regular basis.
In this method, a set of files are usually individually added to each spot group associated with a commercial break. Set the Spot Group Type to Block. To schedule the ads in the precise order specified, set the Sort option to Per Folder/Unsorted. Otherwise Randomly is a good option if you intend to use the same set of commercials in other commercial breaks during the day. Add the Spot Group once to a rotation to schedule all the ads at once. This method will often require a rotation for each hour that you advertise. If this is 24 hours a day, then you may need 24 rotations, unless some commercial breaks are to be repeated. Adjustments to each commercial break spot group or folder may be required every day to ensure the same commercials are not always played together in the same break. Some operators use a spreadsheet to design what ads should be played and when, and the files moved into the required spot groups every day, for the following days playlist. Individual Method In this method, a spot group is created for each advertiser. The spot group is then placed in the specific desired locations in many rotations. This method also requires up to 24 rotations for unique placements every hour. Adjustments to each rotation is likely to be required every day to ensure the same commercials are not played in the same order every time. Some operators use a spreadsheet to design what ads
should be played and when, and the rotations modified every day, for the
following days playlist. |
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Why have some tracks not been selected after several weeks? The list of tracks in a Category are initially shuffled into a random order. As Creator selects tracks from a category, it goes down the list one by one until it reaches the end of the list. At this point, the track list is shuffled into another random order. It is only the repeat intervals which
interfere with track selection, in particular, the artist repeat
interval. If the artist repeat interval (and title repeat interval) is
set to 0, every single song in a category will be selected before any
songs are repeated. This is the ideal situation, but of course you don't
want songs by the same artist too close together. Each individual category can also have it's own repeat intervals so check these have not been set incorrectly. |
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What does the Playlist Scheduler do? StationPlaylist Scheduler (included in the Creator package) is a small system tray application which loads hourly playlists into a simple audio player (preferably Winamp) every hour. This provides a very basic and budget automation solution where the power of Studio and other automation / live DJ assistance applications are not required. The Scheduler is also able to load
Creator every day or week to automatically generate a new set of
playlists, for unattended automation. |
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Studio Related Answers |
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Studio is basically a sophisticated audio player with special features that radio stations need. Studio is most often used to automatically load playlist files every hour, and play the audio files in an automatic or live assist (manual) mode, as scheduled by Creator or other music scheduling software. Studio is most useful with a music
scheduler, however, Studio can also be used without a scheduler, where
tracks are inserted manually for doing live shows. |
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Why should I use Studio and not a free media player? Winamp and other simple media players are only
suitable for very basic automation requirements. Studio provides
many advantages for automation, such as However, Studio is also valuable in
assisting DJ's/presenters/announcers with their live shows. |
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Does Studio keep a track of played advertisements for billing? Studio Pro can generate a detailed CSV
log file of every spot played. This
file can be loaded directly into a spreadsheet and filtered to produce
spot summaries for advertisement
billing purposes. Studio can also record each song played for
royalty recording purposes. |
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Why are
spots not showing with the red dot icon? If you are using Creator to generate
the playlists, the Playlist Format option in Creator needs
to be changed to the StationPlaylist Studio selection.
Creator defaults to the Standard M3U format which can not
provide the additional information required for spots, Timed Spots and
Break Notes to function. |
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Why are Timed Spots not playing at the specified time? If the above answer doesn't apply, then
check the Timed Spots option on the Advanced Options tab.
If it is set to Schedule Next, the spot will
play after the current track has finished. Switch to Instant Play
if you need Timed Spots to play at the precise specified times.
The current playing track will be truncated and faded out when the spot
plays. |
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Why are some songs and spots fading out too early?
Studio provides an intelligent automatic crossfading
system. This starts the next track playing when the last peak volume
of the current track drops below -15
decibels. This system works very well for most tracks, but in some
cases, manual adjustments may be required. There are several
solutions.
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Can I use a 3rd party Scheduler with Studio? Yes. Studio can read standard M3U playlists which many schedulers can generate, however, to use some of the advanced features of Studio, a special playlist format is required which only Creator natively supports. The advanced features include support for Timed Spots, Break Notes, and Voice Track Overlapping. Studio requires the music
and spots to be combined in the same playlist. Some schedulers can
only provide separate playlist logs for the music and the spots. |
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How do I add Winamp plugins to Studio? Studio can utilize Winamp DSP plugins for such things as audio compression/limiting and internet streaming. Studio looks in the Winamp Folder specified on the Files & Folders options tab for DSP plugins and copies them to the StationPlaylist folders so they can be used by Studio. Simply install the DSP plugin to the
default Winamp folder. |
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How do I stream on the Internet with Studio? The Studio installer includes the Oddcast stream encoder. This supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and AAC+ stream encoding for Shoutcast and Icecast2 servers. The Shoutcast DSP Winamp Plugin may also be installed and utilized by Studio. For WMA streaming, the free Windows Media Encoder may be installed. For Real Audio encoding, the free Real Producer Basic encoder from Real Networks may be used. See the Studio help documentation for more
details. |
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Why is there a delay in the Mic audio when using the Mic button? By default, Studio records the Mic audio from the soundcards recording device digitally, optionally processes the audio using compressor/limiter DSP plugins, and then outputs the audio to the soundcards output device. The recording and output stages require buffering to prevent stuttering in the audio playback. At the default settings, the output Buffer Size is 500ms and the input Buffer Size is 100ms, so the delay is at least 600ms. On super fast PC's which have no other applications running, it can be possible to use an output Buffer Size of 150ms and an input Buffer Size of 75ms. This reduces the delay to under a quarter of a second. It is possible to remove the delay completely by changing an option on the Mic Input tab. Change Record from Device to Control Output Mixer. Studio will not touch the audio at all. It will pass straight through the soundcard only, so there is no delay. However, this means means the VU meter will not reflect the Mic audio; DSP plugins cannot process the Mic audio; and encoding a stream using the DSP audio will not include the Mic audio. The stream encoder (eg. Oddcast) will need to be switched to record from the soundcard. A solution for those wanting no delay but
need the Mic audio compressed for internet broadcasting, see
StationPlaylist Streamer. This utility costs only $27 / €19 for
Studio licence holders. |
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