I should know this but it doesn’t seem to work the way I think it should.
I get playlists for shows that are Artist-Song with no durations. Once I get then imported I set the start time for the first track and ensure that “Last Song Time + 3:33” is set. Also the little checkbox at the top left of the entry area that says “auto”. When I go back after the show nothing has changed. Did I forget a step?
If you don’t have song durations then Spinitron cannot add duration to the start time of a song.
So the “Last song time+3:33” only works if you enter data through the form without durations (live or preloading) and not on import? Or am I completely missing the point of that function?
Wait, sorry, I misunderstood your original question.
You’re talking about the last song start time plus a fixed time interval of your choice in the playlist preferences (cog icon).
All that does is set the initial value of the start time input in the form on page load. In other words, after you click Submit the page reloads with an empty form except for the timestamp input, which is set to the start time of the spin you just entered plus the interval of your choice, e.g 3 min 30 second.
The small “auto” checkbox is not really related. It works with the start time and duration values of spins already in the playlist table as shown in the video…
So to get some sort of timestamp on the tracks (mostly so that Radio ReThink can post the track on the webplayer) I would need to import the incomplete list, and then edit them to put them up in the form and get a duration time (inaccurate as it may be) if the entry area doesn’t suggest something.
No. Timestamps do not depend on durations. Many stations don’t even enable the duration field.
Spinitron has a couple of tricks that use timestamp plus duration to compute a timestamp for the next song that’s very likely to be wrong. Some users find these tricks useful.
Why don’t we take a step or two backwards and let me ask: What is it that you are trying to accomplish?
Okay sounds good. Trying to accomplish 3 things:
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a list that will show as played for logging and charting purposes
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a public listing on the show page (https://spinitron.com/m/playlist/view/) and the public page(https://spinitron.com/CHLY/pl/)
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something that Radio Rethink will grab (albeit time inaccurately) and show as “playing” on our web player.
I’ve been gradually getting to logging the syndicated shows. The doc file would be good enough for government and PROs but the powers that be want all the songs to appear while playing on the web player (partly to avoid the emails/phone calls about “what song was that 3days ago at 4:12 am”)
So I have been trying to figure the best way to deal with it.
Ok. So far what you describe doesn’t require durations.
Where is the playlist data coming from? You mentioned that you used imports. Can you give an example of a data file?
You can paste a data file into a gist on Github https://gist.github.com/ and give us the URL.
Well that was fun. Took a bit to figure out Github and get an account. The playlist data is usually coming from a .docx or .pdf, massaged in Notepad until I can get it to copy and paste into import and process nicely.
Here is the github link to a sample file. The file is actually being used for the July 2 show even though it says June 25. I have already changed all the hyphens into tabs but otherwise haven’t messed with it. https://gist.github.com/ArbieFru/a98ee99b8f82cc5ad130e1f2331fbd07
With data like that I would not use import. Entering each spin into a playlist using the manual form would be quick and would fix a number of issues in the process thanks to auto-complete and the Did you mean? search.
How did the data get into a computer in the first place? If someone typed it into Excel, or Word, or Notepad or something, who was that? And why not ask that person to type it into Spinitron instead.
Sorry. I didn’t know it stopped allowing anonymous use.
That’s kind of what I was doing, except I imported then edited each entry in the manual form. I was hoping there was some easier way.
Most of the playlists I get that look like that are from syndicated shows, sometimes .pdf or .doc files sometimes just text in the email or scraped from a website. Not sure these are sources I would want to give access to Spinitron, nor do I think they would be happy to do more work for us.
But thanks for your help, sorry it took so long to get to the root of it.
If you do use import, try the search button (spy glass icon) on each spin after loading them into the playlist. It runs the Did you mean? search interactively. It may find song duration, label and cover art for you.
Auto-complete might work better than Did you mean? but it only works when you type into the playlist entry form. So I suggest you experiment with both to find what works best for each of your sources.
Thanks Tom.
I had never clicked on that search button before, I think that will be the ticket to curing most of my frustration. I have 10-15 hours of shows per week that come this way, and I don’t have the 4-5 hours for me to do it manually, so anything that makes it a little more automatic means I get closer to 100% compliance.