TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Understanding Segue Markers

AutoCast 3.1 and up includes a segue marker feature that lets you customize how much your songs will overlap each other. This is a great way to give your automated programming a "hand-mixed," professional sound. It requires that you mark the segue-in and segue-out attributes of each song, but we believe it is worth the effort for the improvement in your station's sound.

First, open a music folder and assure the segue-in and segue-out attributes are visible. If they are not, click on the Attributes pulldown menu, then click on each of those two attributes to put a checkmark next to it. Now use the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of your folder window to scroll all the way to the right, and you should see two narrow new columns. Widen them a bit by dragging the crack between the columns to spread them apart. Now you will see the headings indicating they are the columns you want, and beneath each heading are hyphens in the rows for the individual songs. To change the hypens to actual values, just click on them, wait a second until the hyphen becomes a black block with a white character in it, then type the value, and hit Enter on your keyboard.

Listen to each song in the folder while looking at the second hand on a clock or stopwatch, time their intros and outros, and and custom-mark that song's overlap times (segue-in and segue-out attributes). For example, when you listen to the start of a song, you may notice that there is a soft intro that you wouldn't mind having overlap with the end of the previous song. In your judgement, the allowable amount of intro on *that* song should be about four seconds. The end of that song has a long, fading ending, and you determine the last six seconds of that song could probably safely overlap with another song. So you mark the segue-in and segue-out points accordingly. Another song might have a cold start (no intro) and a fade-out ending, and you judge that that song should have a segue-out of about five seconds. Each song should be marked based on what makes sense for that song.

Note...

• The left and right arrow buttons let you flip through pages and pages of MyShow buttons, all configured exactly as you want them.
• You don't have to listen to the whole song. Use your media player's draggable progress bar to skip to the end of the song after hearing the intro.
  
  
  
• The left and right arrow buttons let you flip through pages and pages of MyShow buttons, all configured exactly as you want them.
• Careful not to go overboard on the overlap times. Five or six seconds is generally about the max two songs can overlap each other before it starts to sound distracting.
  
  
  
• The left and right arrow buttons let you flip through pages and pages of MyShow buttons, all configured exactly as you want them.
• If you're an over-the-air broadcaster and don't want to disturb your broadcast by playing songs to time them, and you have a copy of your music library on another computer, you can listen to the songs off-air without affecting your broadcast. If you are an Internet broadcaster, you can listen to the songs on your TuneTracker computer; just use the operating system's "Media Player" rather than SoundPlay, and the work will not go over your Internet stream.

When AutoCast plays everything back, it will overlap the songs based on the lower of the two numbers involved. See the examples below...showing how two songs will interact with each other based on their marked segue times.

Example One:

Song 1
Segue Out: 7

Song 2
Segue In: 4

(the amount of overlap will be four seconds, the lesser value of the two)


Example Two:

Song 1
Segue Out: 0 (Cold Ending)

Song 2
Segue In: 5

(the overlap will be one second)*

* Here's the reason the amount of overlap in the second example is one second rather than zero seconds. If there is no available segue value for one (or both) of the songs in a transition, AutoCast uses the "universal overlap" amount set in System Prefs, which by default is one second. In our experience, this works out just fine.

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