Daylight Savings Time Change

Daylight Savings Time ends this Sunday morning at 2:00 am here in eastern US. I haven’t found any info about how Spinitron deals with the repeat of the 1:00 am hour. We have a DJ here who is asking how to put data in for a prerecord. Any hints?

Hi Greg. Thanks for joining the forum!

That’s a good question and if I were smart enough to answer it I could surely get a well paying job in industry.

You are in eastern USA zone, iiuc, known as America/New_York in the Olson tzdb. So tomorrow morning we’re looking at a progression like this as time goes on

UTC        America/New_York Your locale time
04:00 00:00-04:00 12:00 AM
04:20 00:20-04:00 12:20 AM
04:40 00:40-04:00 12:40 AM
05:00 01:00-04:00 1:00 AM
05:20 01:20-04:00 1:20 AM
05:40 01:40-04:00 1:40 AM
06:00 01:00-05:00 1:00 AM
06:20 01:20-05:00 1:20 AM
06:40 01:40-05:00 1:40 AM

I can’t think of many ways to enter a time value into a form that distinguish 05:20 UTC from 06:20 UTC if the string entered into the form is in your local zone. I’ve got only two ideas

  1. Enter the ISO 8601 format with the local time offset to UTC (as in the second column of the table), e.g.

    01:20-04:00

    01:20-05:00

  • Enter the EDT or EST zone signifier, e.g.

    1:20 AM EDT

    1:20 AM EST

On testing this just now it appears our software accepts these formats in the spin Start time field and correctly interprets them. But it then does something that’s usually helpful but, for these two hours out of every year, defeats the zone/offset input.

On the server, Spinitron takes the string you enter into Start, whatever format you use, validates it and if it’s ok converts it into a full UTC date/time. It then formats that into a short locale string and sends that back to the browser, updating the value in the Start field. The locale format is correct but doesn’t have offset or zone signifies because users generally don’t want to deal with that stuff. So the offset/zone you enter is carefully understood and then lost.

That counts as a bug. I’m not sure how to fix it and I doubt I can fix it before the end of today.

Update: It seems editing spin start times in the playlist table fails in the same way. :(

Possible workaround

If your station has the duration field enabled and your DJ has a duration value for all the spins then the auto-time feature might do the job.