I'm spending some time this week going through all of our automation scheduling and making some improvements.

One thing I'm trying to do, but really struggling with, is getting a cart to play at a certain time.

We leave a copy of Myriad running automation 24/7 and presenters fade it down when they start their live show and fade it up again afterwards. This doesn't always make for a smooth transition.

So what I'm trying to do is play a cart containing the pips at 6 seconds before the end of the hour (the pips are 6 seconds long), and then start the next hour with a cart containing 3 seconds of silence. This will give the presenters enough time to bring the Myriad fader down and start their show. Likewise at the end of a presenter's show I want the last 3 seconds of that hour to be the silent cart. I only want this for the time when a live show starts and ends, so I've setup a few different clocks with the required rules (or so I thought).

So here's how I want it to work (the live show in this example starts at 8pm and ends at 10pm):

19:59:54 - play the pips cart
20:00:00 - play the silent cart
20:00:03 - continue normal music/links (in case presenter doesn't turn up)
...
21:59:57 - play the silent cart
22:00:00 - continue normal music/links

I thought I'd got it setup correctly with an absolute time marker followed by the pips or silent cart, but Myriad doesn't seem to be honouring the absolute time marker.

I've uploaded a screen shot of the clock containing the pips at the end here:
http://www.matt.org.uk/pictures/clock-end-with-pips.jpg

...and a screen shot of the resulting schedule here:
http://www.matt.org.uk/pictures/schedule-view.jpg

I know there's a lot of overrun on that hour, I'm still trying to balance the right number of songs/links, but Myriad will just drop songs to make it fit - is that right?

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? It seems to be the same logic as firing a news jingle before the top of the hour, but I've never done that either.

Thanks

Matt