Talk shows in program schedule

⚙️ Web integration
#1

Hello, My apologies if this has been covered before but in searching the forum, I’m not entirely sure I found any solutions. We have a number of non-music programs here at WERA and they show up on the schedule but do not in archive. For instance, on Wednesdays at 5:30pm ET we have an experimental sound program called Story & Sound and the 30 minutes prior to that is music mix automation. It will post the automated music from 5-5:30pm ET but never lists the program at 5:30pm ET

We are using the basic iFrame for our schedule, but perhaps there is something I’m missing. I thought originally it had to do with how the program was set up in Spinitron, but I’ve added that DJ to the program. I’m sure it’s an easy fix but I can’t seem to figure it out!

We’re getting ready to migrate to a new site for wera.fm so I want to try and sort out some of the things that have been on the “to figure out” list.

Thanks!

#2

Hi @lauree,

My first guess is that the non-music programs in question don’t have any playlists in Spinitron. If there isn’t a playlist then we don’t have something to put a play button beside.

Can you play the programs in the archive by choosing their date and time?

#3

Thanks, Tom. I’m still learning the archive player since I haven’t really had a chance to explore it since we tested it out in late December. I CAN listen to the archive of the 5:30pm program when I select today’s date and 5:30pm from the menu.

Should we have these DJs/Producers place a “song” entry for their weekly episodes that includes the program title and topic? Would that help by creating a playlist for their program and allow it to be easier to find archives and therefore program information as it’s playing?

I just added a song of Story & Sound “Baby Panda” to the playlist for that program and it shows up now, so I think that might be the best way forward for our talk and experimental shows!

Thanks so much! Loving the new features!

#4

You don’t need a song in the playlist. You just need a playlist.

Think of a playlist as a form that says what happened on the radio for a certain period of time. The form has its own fields at the top of the page including DJ name, date, time, duration, title, description, episode name and description. Below those fields the form has space to write down any music played. A DJ that plays no music can properly complete and submit the form leaving the space for music empty.

Continuing with the analogy, Spinitron is like a station administrator with the stack of playlist forms that DJs turned in after their shows. If you have one for the 5:30pm show then that means something. But if there is none, what does that mean? That depends on your station’s policy for DJs turning in playlist forms.

Spinitron acts like an admin who doesn’t know your policy. If Spinitron has a playlist then it can display it in various ways and it can attach archive features to those displays. It cannot do that with playlists it doesn’t have. And it does not assume that a program that had been in the schedule did in fact happen when no playlist for it exists.

I can’t say what you should do. I can say how Spinitron works.

  1. If a playlist exists then Spinitron will display it with archive features regardless if it has any spins or not.
  2. In the absence of a playlist, what have you got? The past schedule says what had been planned at different times and the archive recordings should reveal what actually happened.