How To Add Hourly Playlists in RadioDJ When Using External Music Schedulers?
In this tutorial i will show you how to load hourly .m3u playlists in RadioDJ using one single event.
This scenario is often used when external schedulers handle the playlist of a radio automation program. For this tutorial, we will use Music 1 scheduler.
In our event we will use the “Load M3U Playlist by Date Mask” event action.
– First, we need to create a new event in RadioDJ and choose repeat by day and hour type, set the time to trigger at 00:00 (top of the hour).
– Add the “Load M3U Playlist by Date Mask” event action, in which it asks for the playlists path. By default Music 1 generates the playlists in “C:\Music 1 SE\Playlists”.
– The second item we must enter is the datetime mask. For this we need to see how the scheduler is naming the playlist files.
In Music 1 we can check by going to System – System Settings and in Automation tab, we can select a format. In my case i use “yymmdd”, which means the year, from 00 to 99, the month, from 01 through 12 and the day of the month, from 01 through 31. So for 8 July 2016, we will have 160808.
After this, the scheduler appends the hour for which the playlist must play. So we get 160808.00.m3u, 160808.01.m3u, 160808.02.m3u and so on. In RadioDJ the date and time mask is using the standard .NET format, which can be consulted here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4(v=vs.110).aspx
MASK | DESCRIPTION |
---|---|
“d” | The day of the month, from 1 through 31. |
“dd” | The day of the month, from 01 through 31. |
“ddd” | The abbreviated name of the day of the week. |
“dddd” | The full name of the day of the week. |
“h” | The hour, using a 12-hour clock from 1 to 12. |
“hh” | The hour, using a 12-hour clock from 01 to 12. |
“H” | The hour, using a 24-hour clock from 0 to 23. |
“HH” | The hour, using a 24-hour clock from 00 to 23. |
“m” | The minute, from 0 through 59. |
“mm” | The minute, from 00 through 59. |
“M” | The month, from 1 through 12. |
“MM” | The month, from 01 through 12. |
“MMM” | The abbreviated name of the month. |
“MMMM” | The full name of the month. |
“s” | The second, from 0 through 59. |
“ss” | The second, from 00 through 59. |
“t” | The first character of the AM/PM designator. |
“tt” | The AM/PM designator. |
“y” | The year, from 0 to 99. |
“yy” | The year, from 00 to 99. |
“yyy” | The year as a four-digit number. |
“yyyyy” | The year as a five-digit number. |
So, for our format we need to enter this mask: yyMMdd.HH The m3u extension will be added automatically by the program.
– We save the event and from now at each top of the hour RadioDJ will load the playlist for the day and hour at which it runs the event.
NOTE:
Most of the times is impossible for a scheduler to create a playlist with the exact duration of 60 minutes, especially if you don’t have many tracks to choose from, so if you must sync the playlist start, you can also add two more actions to the event: “Clear Playlist” (to delete any not played tracks) and “Start Playing” (which will force to fade from the current playlist to the new one).