TuneTracker™ QuickTip   
Better Overnight Pausing

Our customers aren't the only ones discovering new features and better ways to do things in AutoCast. We're discovering them too! And when we do, we share them here in QuickTips. This week's tip is based on a customer's need for a rock-solid way to do overnight pausing, and will be useful in any environment where dead silence is required during certain parts of the day, such as:

    Time-shared broadcasters who only run their programming during part of the broadcast day
    Other venues providing music and entertainment only at specific times of day
We have discovered that the "infinite pause" described in our documentation does the best job of long-term pausing. Here's an example showing a radio station that goes off the air at 7 p.m. and goes back on the air at 5 a.m.

(start of log)

# Hour 0

# Interrupt@:00:00

# Pause-For 99:00:00

# Hour 5

# SS On

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 6

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 7

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 8

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 9

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 10

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 11

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 12

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 13

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 14

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 15

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 16

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 17

(normal programming  goes here)

# Hour 18

(normal programming  goes here)

# interrupt@:59:00

/path/file/signoff.mp3

# Hour 19

# SS off

# Pause-For 99:00:00

(end of log)

As you can see in the example, we don't even bother to include the # Hour statements for all of the intervening hours where the pause-for is happening, and AutoCast seems to like it just fine. We have tested this approach quite thoroughly now and feel confident in it as a very solid way to handle overnight pause-fors.

Note that during the pause-for events we have turned the silence sensor off, since this is necessary in some versions of TuneTracker. We have not tested this approach in TuneTracker versions prior to 3.0, so if you try it on an earlier system, please let us know how it works for you as well.

Also note that if you load the program log during a pause-for time period, you must do the same two steps as during normal automated programming. Click Auto-On and click Start.


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