cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Alan Levine
The ds106 radio has been silent for 2 days. The station doors were locked shut, lights off, and only faint sounds of scurrying and muffled electrical tools were heard. But as reported by Grant Potter, the ice weasels were successful in rebuilding a newer and more flexible system.
Some new features in the Airtime software are making me reconsider the previous approach to managing the scheduled content, the stuff that plays if there is no live broadcast. In that approach, I had divided each day into 8 hour blocks, and asked people to go in each week and populate it with content.
This has worked well the last few months- I know that Bill Smith, Andy Forgrave, Christina Hendricks (and maybe others) were pitching in. But the tedious part was having to fill in content every week.
The new station software allows us to not only schedule blocks of time to repeat, but now we can have the content within it repeat as well. I’ve done a few tests, and it works. For example, I put in a show on Sunday afternoons (PST) when Phoenix’s NPR station KJZZ runs The Low Down Blues Show with Bob Corritore,
And repeated content can be a playlist or a smart block.
So I am thinking about asking people to make up and manage some playlists or smart blocks, and suggest times they would like to see it play. This way, they do not have to go in and fiddle with content, but can just update a playlist (or upload new stuff with proper metadata for smart blocks to work).
For example, let’s say Dr Garcia wants to run a two hour playlist of Muppets songs, she just needs to make a playlist or smart block (these are better because they can be random), and we can have this always be in the cue on Thursdays at 10pm. Or she can just have a GNA playlist she manages, and whenever she wants to change it, the next time her scheduled block comes up, we hear the new playlist.
Its still not quite worked out, but if you do have a desire to plan maybe 2 or more hours of content as a playlist, or want to have a particular radio show cross cast at a certain time, let me know. For now, I have turned off the ability to edit the calendar as we test this out.
But also, we need help repopulating the music library! Because the shelves were cleaned out by those ice weasels.
Bless the weasels.
cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Zack Dowell
