After all this time I still have problems with one-off shows: I created a show well before its intended start time and started the log making some non-music talk notations. And I went away and did something else until the show started. When I went into the schedule the one-off had not overwritten the regular shows. I found it by going to the public page and clicking into it from the public schedule. I also checked the Radio Rethink player and it was still listing the regular shows. Does the whole thing just take awhile to propagate through the system or am I just confused about the way it’s meant to work. I thought it might be because I hadn’t entered an actual music track so I did but that didn’t seem to make a difference. So the net result is that the only time a listener can see the correct listing is if they go to spinitron dot com/chly for the playlist and from there click calendar to see how long the show is.
Hey Tom, Small nudge…any thoughts on what I am doing wrong?
Playlists are not shown in the program schedule available to logged-in to Spinitron users.
Yes. The public calendar combines the display of playlists and scheduled shows thus: Playlists take priority over shows in the past. In the future, only playlists with the “future public playlist” checkbox checked are displayed.
There is no delay in the changes you make becoming visible on spinitron.com. (So perhaps its the other thing;) However, I don’t know the exact algorithms Radio Rethink player uses.
Q1: for the Schaefer Bros. Does AirPocket player display upcoming shows and if so does it include future public playlists among those?
Q2: Could caching of API responses lead to what confused Arbie?
OK
A future public playlist should also be visible to listeners on its corresponding pubic show page (if it has one) and on the public DJ page of its owner. I’m not sure if it appears in the upcoming shows list on the landing page spinitron.com/CHLY/; I should check on that.
I think I see what I did wrong. If I have to cover someone’s butt and put something together I consider that an unscheduled show that replaces the scheduled show. So I merrily go to Playlist>New where it tells me “For an unscheduled program use a [blank playlist]”. Wrong. Go to Schedule, click on “New Show” create a show with one run time, no repeats and then it will change the schedule by overwriting the show you are replacing. Then other logged-in hosts will know what is going on as well as listeners. Semantics. You meant something different by “unscheduled” than I thought you did.
The option “For an unscheduled program use a [blank playlist]” creates a playlist that is not associated with any show in the program schedule. You’re free to use that for ad hoc substitutions so long as you don’t need/expect to find the playlist via a show in the program schedule. If you also check the "future public playlist” checkbox on that playlist then it will appear in the public calendar but that’s not the same as the program schedule as I described above on Oct 9.
If, for your own reasons, you need in addition to associate this playlist with a show in the program schedule then don’t use the “[blank playlist]” option. If no scheduled show is suitable for the playlist then you need to create one first via the Schedule page and then select that show when creating the playlist.
Assuming the latter is the case for you then I think we agree. If, otoh, you decide you don’t need the extra show then you can save that step and learn not to look for the playlist via the (logged-in user’s) schedule.
Thanks Tom. Even if I don’t need a feature I try to understand what’s available. Don’t know how I missed understanding this considering how long we have been using your service. Better late than never.
I really believe that the way Spinitron on the one side in the program schedule represents shows, each of which may have recurrences, which expand to a sequence of occurrences each of which has a date and time; and on the other side represents playlists, each of which has a date and time, is a bit confusing.
In the real world of radio broadcasting things like this don’t really exist (we…, maybe sorta but they are different) and people don’t think this way. Among radio people a show, an occurrence, and episode and a playlist are to some extent interchangeable. There’s no problem with that.
The problem is entirely our fault. It is the mismatch between how we deigned the database (which is a strictly formal schema) and how real people think (which is much more flexible). After all these years I’m not sure I have any better ideas for how it could have been designed but I accept the blame anyway.
In my limited understanding of databases I assume that although they are theoretically infinitely flexible you have to constrain some of that flexibility to make sense of the interrelations between fields. If shows aren’t the recurring unit then what? I think it would be rather complicated if you considered time as a recurring function (time of course is unique except when considered with day and date). I’m hurting my brain. I think you got it right.
Let’s find something to do that doesn’t hurt our brains?