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Quick procedural question for you guys that use Zara.
We have a standard daily playlist that consists of an 8 hour block of programming and plays all the time.
Quick procedural question for you guys that use Zara.
We have a standard daily playlist that consists of an 8 hour block of programming and plays all the time.
All special shows, stream pickups and etc. are maintained in their own individual playlist which is called through the scheduler and interrupts the standard daily playlist. Once the event has finished it goes back to the daily playlist.
How do you manage your programming with Zara?
Total posts : 45366Zara is pretty versatile,a lot of options that work well.The scheduler is awesome! I do news at the top and bottom of the hour and weather at 15 and 45 with time,temp and many jingles and id’s in rot files. I loaded the jingles hotbuttons as well with anything from id’s to sound effects. Best thing I ever did was to edit all my music mp3’s to eliminate all silence at the beginning and end,makes for a very tight mix as I hate overlaps. Sattelite works good with DTMF but falses once in a while,dont know why. I use wget to fetch FSN news and Pirate weather files every 30 minutes and American Sunrise every weekday. Regards,Lee
Total posts : 45366ZaraRadio is pretty popular with Part15.us members.
Author’s site:
Here are some previous Part15.us discussion threads:
http://www.part15.us/node/1065
http://www.part15.us/node/1171
http://www.part15.us/node/1173
Experimental broadcasting for a better tomorrow!
Total posts : 45366I know, I posted in a few of those threads. =)
My question was on *how* you do your scheduling 🙂
Total posts : 45366I use the scheduler for all planned events like stories/book-chapters, ID, promos for the planned events, news, weather, time, science shorts, etc.
Then I have playlists that I make up that are like “Morning coffee #27” or “Saturday Night (rowdy) #5” or “Satuday Night (kicked back)#3”. Each of the playlists is actually several hours long, so if I’m not sitting right there to change them, it’s no big problem.
I load the playlists throughout the day, and leave them on random.
I also make playlists for special events like holidays, like “Christmas holiday evening” or whatever.
Other than the playlists I also have the event scheduler set to play 2 songs at random from the “new material” folder, 2 from “Golden age” (early 1900s 78s or cylinder recordings), 2 from “local bands”, and one from “indies we’re promoting” in the course of each hour.
I don’t download pirateweather or the news and etc ahead of time, it usually works fine to let it just play it from the URL. There’s a few moments of silence at the end sometimes, or it doesn’tload right, but better than 90% of the time it works like a charm and that’s good enough.
All the “jingles” buttons are station IDs or comedic shorts or little bits about the station.
If I or anyone in my household feels like “taking charge” and DJing for a while. they just step in and can either load their fave playlist or just toss some songs at the top of the current playlist and manually cue them. I often will only actually manually DJ for a little bit in an average hour, most of the time I just listen to the station. Anyone DJ-ing live can manually cancel any upcoming scheduler event *except* stories/book-chapters, since those are scheduled items people tune in for.
Running it this way, we have a lot of variety in the rotation, new material (less than a week old) is there every single hour, local bands get played, indies that want to be pushed a bit get played, and even “running on autopilot”the station is interesting and diverse to listen to. About 1/3 of our programming is talk (mostly stories or book chapters) and the rest is indie music or music recorded by us or friends of ours with a bit of historic oldies that have gone into the public domain or where there is a clear permission for non-commercial use.
But we can step in and dj whenever the mood strikes or if a listener calls and wants the weather other than at a scheduled time or would like a time check or wants to hear a song they like off our playlists. I dj every Saturday night from midnight to 6, and my daughter djs a show earlier in the evening on saturdays and fridays, but other than that there is no regular live dj-ing except whenever mood hits or a listener calls.
It’d work as well for stations doing commercial/hit music, but one of out mottos is “Radio Strange.. All the best music you never heard.”, so we do no “top-40” or “classic oldies” newer than maybe 1920 where it’s definitely also fallen into the public domain.
One other thing I use the scheduler for is to play a track once every two hours by any indie artist or group who has sent me a CD within the past couple weeks, since they deserve heavy rotation beyond the “new” folder.
I don’t feel I’m using Zara to it’s full potential yet. Like I think there’s a way to schedule it to load playlists. But it’s easy enough to run as it is that I don’t worry about it too much and I’ve been kind of growing into it as I learn the software better over the months. I tried using 1.4 with Sound Solution, but my listeners preferred the fadethroughs and didn’t like the havilly processed sound from Sound Solution as well as just the AGC of Zara, so I went back to 1.6.
I have SAM2 (which I used to use for stream DJing), and don’t use it anymore, since Zara works better for me.
In my opinion, Zara rocks.
Daniel
Total posts : 45366Ok, figured out how to add the playlist changes into the scheduler as well. At least good for having a default set, and manual override once in a while on what playlist is in place will keep it from getting too “stale”.
So the “autopilot” here just got a little better. LOL
Daniel
Total posts : 45366We’re using Station Playlist Creator, which automagically builds the playlists, then WinAmp handles the playout duties. This works great for automation with a music format, but has obvious limitations beyond that. Have any of folks tried integrating SPC with Zara? That would seem to be a great combo. I’d love to know how to do that.
1610AM The Copperhead
It’s All Rock n’ Roll
Lucama NC
Total posts : 45366If you generate an .m3u playlist, Zara will run it just fine. I know SPC will do that. Generate your playlists ahead of time and have the event schedule pick it up at a predetermined time. I had mine load at midnight. Using Zara would give you the advantage of having the event scheduler. That combined with SPC should give you a really good sounding station.
I have played with the SPC demo a few times. The demo won’t generate a playlist file so I couldn’t test the output in an automation system. I did like it, though. Much lower learning curve than MusicGen.
Total posts : 45366Hi Bro, I am in New Zealand and use Zara, I have a main playlist that runs 24hrs with scheduled events for time, songs etc, what I am trying to schedule now is another playlist that plays in the night time, that will revert back to the main playlist when it is finished. So far I have not been able to get it to change back to the main list, when it finished.
Peter
Total posts : 45366My main playlist called “Top Of Hour” starts at the top of the hour with Station ID, FSN News, NOAA Weather forecast, Zara Time/Temp announcement and an Amber Alert promo/alert.
That playlist ends by calling the next playlist, the “B List”, a series of 2 random plays followed by a random 3 Stooges sound byte. If it runs to the end it simply repeats. Since it is made up of random plays, a different tune for each artist would be heard, no repeats.
The 2 random plays are from about 30 different local artists. Each artist has a separate file folder from which a random play occurs.
Mixed in there is a One Minute Zine Review and Promos for the talk shows.
That fills up an hour.
Other playlists are for The Kevin Smith Show, The Radios Dan Show, The Under Dog Radio Show, SETI’s The Big Picture Show and on Saturday night a 30’s Big Band 1/2 hour and Myer’s Lake Ballroom Dance Radio Show. These are scheduled for specific times and days. The schedule is timed so these are called up as the “Top Of Hour” playlist should be ending.
All the time sensitive material (News, Weather, Amber Alerts) are downloaded at regular intervals automatically using WGET. The current temperature data is handled by Weather Watcher which updates Zara automatically.
The Kevin Smith Show is a live stream. The Radio Dan Show is a live stream which is recorded live and rebroadcast at 3 other times. SETI’s show is manually downloaded twice a month.
With all of Zara’s capabilities the whole operation is automated except for the manual downloads mentioned.
It rarely crashes and usually it’s the live stream that has a problem as the Kevin Smith Show is all to often knocked down by hackers. Usually Zara can recover using the silence detector. That causes the playlist to recycle and start the stream again.
On rare occasions the system crashes and must be restarted.
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