Hi! We’ve been using V2 for about 3 weeks now and we’re wondering how we can add static content to the list of programs such that when a nonmusic element is playing it shows up in RDS.
Miniprograms do show up on the calendar, and they do show up as “coming up”.
But they do not show up as playing on RDS, or as having been played.
I get it that they are not songs, and that this is a playlisting system not necessarily designed to handle all of our RDS needs…and yet, it still seems like there might be a solution.
We have experimented with having programmers put in “miniprograms” into their playlists by noting it like a song, which sort of works, but isn’t optimal.
We’re working on feature that might help. It’s based on this issue in the tracker. It will work as follows:
You set a message template to be used when a “now playing” song begins (or as soon as possible thereafter, within limits, see Metadata push: Default and Max Duration).
You set a different message template to be used when the now playing song ends. This is calculated using spin timestamp plus duration (or, if actual duration isn’t available, spin timestamp plus Default Duration).
And there will be new “fallback” tokens that you can use in the template that allow you to send song title, playlist name, show name, station name, station title depending what information is available.
This could work for your scenario if everyone who DJs the show before the miniprograms ends with a song that ends (as far as Spinitron’s calculations go) shortly after the beginning of the miniprograms. Of course this isn’t going to work reliably in practice but it will work sometimes.
This would be a case of using Spinitron’s features in a way they were not intended and it’s going to be confusing, unreliable etc. Bad engineering in my view. So I really don’t know why I suggested it.
The right way to solve the problem is to create a one-spin playlist in Spinitron for each upcoming miniprograms as it is produced. Doing it in advance takes the stress out of the process and ensures that the web publishing and metadata push happens at the right time. If producers can’t do it, use an intern or volunteer?