I have written a playlist manager for ZaraRadio using Clarion for Windows. The program has been in development for several months and is in a beta state. I would welcome beta testers if its features sound useful to you. It ran successfully for the two weeks I was out of town recently.
Features (very generally)
Import Zara playlists (currently restricted to .m3u files)
For each playlist imported, specify what action is to be performed:Shuffle, Rotate, Purge
What time to perform this action (called "processing"); what day to start on
Minimum track count; maximum rotation percent (of playlist)
The program keeps track of the various results of processing the playlist and warns when maximums are exceeded
Automatic processing: the program runs all the time, right alongside Zara, waiting for start time to process a playlist.
When a playlist's time has come to process, perform the individual action. The program examines yesterday's and today's Zara log files and all the playlists imported into the playlist manager. One at a time, the playlists are searched for played tracks from the Zara log file. For Rotation and Purge actions, played tracks from the log file are either "Rotated" to the end of the playlist or purged. If Rotated, the user can choose that the rotated tracks be shuffled or not. For purged tracks, the user can choose to have the .mp3 media file deleted as well. For the shuffle option, all tracks in the playlist are shuffled.
There is an assumption here, one's that's ok for my use: the program assumes that a given track name is contained in only one playlist. Since Zara does not log the name of the playlist being loaded (and I wonder, why not?), there is no way to know the playlist.
I'm using the free ZaraRadio edition to power my own personal radio station (we live on 20 acres in a very rural location; because it's mountainous, the signal is heard only in the neighborhood). Because the radio is on 24 hours a day, with 12 different programs throughout the day, and because I don't want to be bothered with frequent maintenance of the radio station, I created a program which automates daily updates to the playlists (they're usually several hundred tracks). A glance at the program can quickly show which playlists are about to repeat.
This is my first post here, and I uploaded photos yet; I'll try to upload screenshots.