We use Spinitron at our radio station and we have noticed that whenever a DJ has an odd time on their playlist or has a sub that week that it shows up on our stations program schedule. For example, Monday morning the DJ started his playlist at 5:55 AM and this weeks program schedule has his show starting at 5:55AM. Or a DJ last week had a sub and it showed them as the show host. Is this a default setting for Spinitorn or is there a way to have a static program schedule? Has anyone else noticed this as well?
When a DJ has an odd time on their playlist or has a sub that week, their playlist appears on the public calendar. The public calendar is not the same as your program schedule.
The two specific cases you mentioned were of past playlists logged at specific dates and times. If you are looking at the week calendar view (as opposed to the month, day or list views) then across the top of the seven columns is the date, not simply the day of week. What happened on Monday 3rd or last week is accurately displayed. We do not show what had been scheduled to happen on past dates if a playlist shows that something different happened.
When you log in to Spinitron and click Schedule in the top nav, you get something different. It displays all future and past occurrences of scheduled shows without any playlists. While there are some minor uses for the past schedule to station staff, we don’t display a past occurrence of a scheduled show to the public if a playlist is available instead because:
- Listeners aren’t normally very interested in what was scheduled to be on air at a given time in the past, they are more interested what was on air.
- Playlists are generally more likely to be correct about what happened when there’s a discrepancy.
- There’s no obvious reason for stations to maintain accurate historical schedules in their Spinitron database. Unlike playlists, obsolete schedules are clutter of little interest. We therefore expect past schedules to be inaccurate.
- Listeners need a way to browse past playlists by date and time and a calendar is suitable.
The public calendar works like this for all stations.
The number one request from stations over the years was for more flexibility in scheduling including alternations, monthly repetition, one-offs, preemption and upcoming episode advertisement. But it means program schedules can be arbitrarily complex. One week is not the same as the next. What happened last Friday at 3pm is not an indication of what will happen next Friday at 3pm. This reflects the reality of operations at many stations.
If
- your schedule is strictly repeating on a day-of-the-week basis
- the schedule seldom changes
- you don’t want to advertise future episodes of shows
- you don’t want to be able to show upcoming preemption or substitutions
then a 24x7 grid of static blocks can be a reasonable presentation of the schedule. But as I explained above, it won’t work in general and that’s why we don’t provide it. If you can’t adapt to the calendar as it is then you’ll need to look at a custom solution.
One possibility would be, from time to time, when the schedule changes, to make a screenshot of a representative week while hiding the date with a CSS trick in the browser and put then on your web site. Ofc, it would not be interactive.
Alternatively with some scripting you can, with one call to the API, fetch the show occurrences for a given week and generate HTML from it that includes links, which may be saved as static web page content.
Btw, Brian, I noticed that the CSS style rules you have saved in Spinitron make playlists and occurrences of scheduled shows look the same in your public calendar. If they are visually distinct, as with, for example, the default styles then listeners should more easily understand their different significance.