Great news Airtimers… welcome to Rotations and Auto DJ!
Rotations
We’re pleased to unveil a new feature called “Rotations”, which brings improved automatic scheduling to your station. A rotation consists of a repeating playlist that automatically pulls content from your library to fill shows with tracks. Rather than scheduling tracks by hand, Airtime Pro can now generate your shows an hour before they start, so that they can automatically include your latest uploads. Better yet, rotations can be combined with smart blocks to automatically schedule your latest uploads or podcasts with ease.
Though rotations may seem similar to dynamic smart blocks on the surface, there are a few unique advantages they provide:
- Rotations are generated an hour before a show starts, so they always include the freshest tracks in your library.
- They automatically “rotate” through your tracks, so each show will be different.
- They’re smarter: Rotations avoid recently played tracks, duplicates, and prefer your latest uploads.
To help you get started, you’ll find a rotation called “Random Mix” added to your station. We’ve set up this rotation with some basic criteria to filter out short tracks (like jingles) and long tracks (like podcasts), so that you can start using it to automatically fill your shows with music. Check it out, experiment, and make your own rotations that fit your shows!
Auto DJ
While we were at it, we added a brand new Auto DJ mode to Airtime Pro to help you automate your radio station. When enabled, Auto DJ will automatically create shows from your favourite rotation or fill up any incomplete shows. As with rotation scheduling, Auto DJ only works ahead by 2 hours, so you can easily mix Auto DJ with your own pre-scheduled shows. With a semi-automated approach like this, you can play what you want, when you want, but let Airtime Pro take care of the rest.
You can find both of these new features on your Airtime Pro radio station today. For more information about how they work, please see this knowledge base article.
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34 Comments
brad lake
fantastic!!!!!!! this is gonna be huge for me!
Rich Strong
Yet, STILL no ability to use Airtime as a live assist software? Wow.
Albert Santoni
Hi Rich, right now your best bet for doing live broadcasting is using desktop software like Mixxx to broadcast through Airtime Pro because you need low latency. In the future, we’ll be looking to improve live broadcasting for Airtime Pro and we’ll definitely take live assist into consideration for that. Thanks for your feedback.
Rich Strong
Which is what I’ve been hearing for years.
This is simple. Really. Write in a way to kill the auto-play in “now playing” to allow manual control.
TH
All we need now is for it to produce a clockwheel with station imaging included and airtime will be perfect!
mart
would be nice to have some kind of setup to plug in mp3 ads to come in every min or so
Martin
Is this just for the Pro Version or the general release?
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Martin,
These are available to everyone on Pro version. We don’t support the open source version anymore.
Thanks,
Alex
John
Hi am John Onochie please, i want to know if i can monetise this radio so i can generate money for upgrading my radio.
Albert Santoni
Hi John, we don’t provide any revenue generation tools (like ads) for you ourselves, but you’re free to find advertisers or sponsors and work out a deal with them yourself.
Hope this helps,
Albert
Itai
Thank you for a wonderful product and service.
Are there plans to allow Rotations generated from Playlists made up of Smart Block elements? I know that this is not an option currently. Or another option: have Shows generated from Playlists made up of Dynamic Smart Blocks such that a show regenerates its content an hour before air time based on the dynamic smart block elements created in the show’s playlist.
Albert Santoni
Hi Itai, we thought about this for a while, and we’re experimenting with the latter (shows from playlists with dynamic blocks in them). We’re also trying to cook up a more general solution that combines rotations with a more powerful scheduling approach. More news on this in a few months.
Itai
Looking forward to it. Keep up the great work!
loicm
Hi,
Do we have these features available on Airtime Community Edition too or is it only for SAAS version ?
Regards,
Albert Santoni
Hi loicm, we’d like to include some of these features in the next community release, but we don’t have a firm timeline for that yet.
Jerry Blum
When uploading music, is the format MP3 at 64 kps. Can you take 128kps? Also, can iTunes format music be uploaded?
Thanks
Albert Santoni
Hi Jerry, 128 kbps should work too with no problems. We currently do support AAC but not Apple Lossless.
Andriy
Hi. Is there an option to upload m3u playlists?
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Andriy,
Not right now, but it’s on our roadmap.
Thanks,
Alex
Auto DJ
Need to be able to add a playlist of smart blocks to a rotation. That way we can create an algorithm so to spreak for the Auto DJ to follow..
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi,
Rotations were designed this way, or in other words – you can use both playlists and smart blocks to build your rotations.
Thanks,
Alex
Youm Wi Lelah
Hi Guys
is there a way to down load analytic data .. mainly listeners stats
this will be great to include in business plans and promotional material
thanks
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Youm,
This is another feature that’s on our roadmap.
Thank you for your feedback,
Alex
Hani Kashou
Hello,
Is there a way we create music folders of different kinds or genres by giving them specific names or tags and airtime plays randomly from those folders we assign on the clocks instead of having to drag manually song by song?
And is there a sound leveler for tracks if one has higher volume than the other?
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Hani,
You can use meta-tags to label your tracks and quickly filter them by just typing few starting letters of that particular meta-tag. It works much better and faster than having folders.
We are also working on new scheduler which will include Clock-wheels and that’s coming in a couple of months.
Finally, if you go to Stream Settings – you can enable loudness control by checking the Enable Replay Gain field.
Thanks,
Alex
Samuel
Hi
I’m trying to set both of the streams i can see in the panel of the free account but i can not modify or try them in the website the system create. i want to know if with that option i am able to stream on my 1st channel our regular programs and use simultaneously the 2nd channel to stream a different program. ex,
channel 1 broadcasting live interview with Oprah
channel 2 broadcasting live game of little soccer league – bulls vs hawks.
if it is the case, the 30Tb bandwidth will be split between the 2 streaming channels?
Please help me to understand the right way to use the option to have up to 3 streams.
Thank you
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Samuel,
You can’t broadcast 2 different things at the same time with only one Airtime Pro station. Different streams are to be used for listeners with different connection bandwidth. In other words, you can optimize your bandwidth usage by streaming lower bitrates to listeners who connect with lower bandwidth, and higher bitrates to listeners with better internet connection.
Regards,
Alex
Kenneth Atkinson
Put my name on the list for for some sort of ID folder so we can have an ID a couple times an hour in auto dj
Is there any plans? Thanks
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hello Kenneth,
We have clock-wheels on the roadmap.
Thanks,
Aleksandar
Bryant D Henderson
Is there a way to have ads or drop or station I’d tags . Randomly?
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Bryant,
We are working on a true Clocks feature to automate a format like that easily and we hope to release it this year.
For the moment though you would either need to create a Playlist that is composed of the Smart Blocks for each of your content, for example, your Playlist could contain a Dynamic Smart Block that pulls 3 music tracks, a Dynamic Smart Block that pulls 1 promo, a Dynamic Smart Block that pulls 2 songs, and a Dynamic Smart Block that pulls 1 liner. When you manually schedule that Playlist, the system will populate all of the tracks for each of those types.
Alternatively, you could create the mix of content by creating a show for each type of content you wanted. As an example, you would create a show that is 20 minutes long and set to be scheduled from a Rotation that will pull in music tracks. Next, you would create a 1 minute show set with a Rotation that will pull in promos, liners, ads, etc. Then you would create a 10 minute show with a music Rotation. Then another 1 minute show for liners etc, and so on.
For either option, you would set up a Repeating show at the top of every hour with a Rotation set for your news programs.
I hope that helps.
Regards,
Alex
Martin White
Great to see these new features. I think for me I would really like to see the pro version of airtime offering 320kbps stream rate. I’m also still not totally convinced that the listener stats are accurate. In the past 14 months we’ve had 4000 downloads of our London Music Radio App but listener numbers don’t seem to have gone up in by the same ratio?
Danny Peguero
OK I need some major help…. I need to add station drops how do I do it that it would automatically air every hour and can I do commercials ? also I am going to have dj mixes only on weekends certain times I keep putting the videos and I can’t seem to get an answer.
or should I just create a playlist with the dj Id or station Id
Aleksandar Brajanoski
Hi Danny,
We already answered this question in this very thread, but let me quote it here for you:
Regards,
Alex