TuneTracker™ QuickTip
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Customizing TuneTracker Pro Time Announcements
TT2 pro comes with a set of 720 professionally-announced/produced time announcement files, all voiced in a pleasant, "casual-announcer" style that will fit into the flow of your programming in a comfortable way. However some may wish to customize some or all of the messages to suit their needs. Here are some ideas and thought-starters:
1. Create a new folder containing a copy of your TT2 Pro time announcement files. Tell TuneTracker preferences to look there instead of in the default folder. Now you have a "playground" where you can safely make changes.
2. Since a time announcement file is just an audio file, you can change its contents to anything you like. The file naming scheme we use makes it easy to determine exactly what file to replace when you want to substitute your own. Here are just some of the interesting possibilities.
- You could do a full set of time announcements in your own voice
- You could leave most of the announcements as they are, but create some special ones for use at certain times of the day...
"WXYZ time is 8:17"
-- UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE! --
"WXYZ newstime is 12:09"
"WXYZ, Anytown, Anystate. It's 12-noon." (top of hour station ID)
"I'm Jeff Michaels, and it's 8:33 on the Classic Rock Hour from WXYZ"
"It's 8:30 and time for another update from ABC News."
"It's 5:15 on the Headin' Home show...stay tuned for our market report, in a moment."
After writing this tip, and prior to sending it to you, we have added another feature! Now, you can now specify a different folder for each # TimeAnnounce event all-day-long if you want. The original program log wording we were using looked like this...
# TimeAnnounce
The place where TT2 Pro looked for the announcements was the default path specified in Preferences.
The new syntax gives you the option of adding the path right into the line, like this...
# TimeAnnounce /boot/path/foldername
That lets you point to different folders at different times of the day, automatically, so you don't have to go into Preferences and change the default folder manually. TuneTracker can now do it for you, right in the program log. If you don't specify a path and folder, the default path in Preferences will be used.
In our experience, TuneTracker users are endlessly creative, so I'm sure you'll dream up lots of your own unique ways to take advantage of this feature. If you do, please drop us a line and we'll include them in future tips or in our newsletter.