Evening all,

I'm wanting to set up a new link to fire off a jingle for a certain year followed by a song from that year, for example the jingle says 'Old Skool Anthem... 1999' and then Autotrack selects a random song from 1999 to fire off.

I've heard this done on a few stations in the past and we're looking at doing it for a golden hour. I've been banging my head and playing with Autotrack with no much success.

I'm guessing I have to set up a song category for each year i.e. 1997, 1998, 1999? It's the link and adding it to a clock that I'm struggling with.


Can anyone help please? We're using Autotrack V3.6.

Thanks,
Gareth

You are right, you have to set up a category for each year to do it this way.
you only have 32 categories though in Autotrak, so it maybe easier to manually insert the year jingles for each golden hour that you schedule.

The way we do our Mystery year show is to schedule a blank hour and let the presenter insert all the songs and jingles, doesn't take him long and is probably the easiest way to do it.

Regards,
Paul Moore

HitMix Radio
0792 858 1075

Hello,

In Autotrack Pro v4 one of things you can specify in the clock design is to "ask" for a year, so every time you schedule this clock you can type in the year you want to schedule from.

HOWEVER: - What you need is a year put into all the song and link cards, and have enough songs from different artists (to fulfil your scheduling rules) in all of the categories you put into the clock.

Just give sales@psquared.net if you'd like more info on upgrading to the latest versions.

Regards

David Boulton
Brand Manager
Broadcast Radio Ltd

Thanks both.

I've set the song categories up and put the songs into certain years.

It's getting it set up into the clock which I'm struggling with. The hours we want this feature will be in 'AutoFade' and only schedule one per hour.

How would I be best to set it up in links? Would I need to set each year as a link category too? Then I need some advice on how to add it into the clock.

I'm going to spend some time this afternoon having a play, so hopefully I'll find a way.

This answer is off the top of my head, but you could look at putting the "year" jingles into a single category, then force that cat to play before the song, but set all of the links to "only play before songs from X category" - that way depending on what category is scheduled into that slot you would only get a jingle that matched.

But that said it's not ideal - equally you've now got a database full of songs broken out by year, which may not line up with your other scheduling demands (e.g. wanting an A-List/B-List/Image/Recurrent etc. type setup)

Much as I hate to say it v4 might well be better - when it asks you for which year to use, that same year is then used for Links that you specify <Ask> for and it's designed to do exactly what you need

------------
Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness