Understanding and Creating Advanced Playlists

Understanding the different playlists:

Playlists in Centova Cast provide convenient groupings of tracks and control exactly how and when those tracks will be broadcast.

Four playlist types are currently available:

• General Rotation
  General rotation playlists are the most common type of playlist, used to play a random selection of media from your library when no other, more specialized playlists are due to be played.
• Scheduled
  Scheduled playlists are used for scheduled broadcasts such as daily countdowns, “top 10” lists, pre-recorded shows, and similar content.
• Interval
  Interval playlists are used for station identification, advertisements, and other similar repeating content that needs to be played every few minutes or after every few tracks.
• Immediate
  Immediate playlists allow tracks to be queued for immediate playback, and are useful for on-the-fly content such as song requests or special announcements.

Creating a Playlist:

In this section, we explain how to create a new playlist for your station.

To create a playlist:

1. In the Centova navigation panel at the left-hand side of the screen, click Playlists under the AutoDJ heading.
2. Click the Create playlist link at the right-hand side of the page.
3. Enter a title for your playlist in the Title field. This is informational only, so choose a title that is descriptive and has meaning to you.
4. Choose a playlist type. Consult the previous section, Understanding Playlists for more information about the purpose of each playlist type.
5. Configure the remaining settings as appropriate based on the playlist type you chose in step 4.

Weighting Playlists

When creating a General Rotation playlist, the most important option is the Playback weight. The weight controls how often tracks from this playlist are played relative to tracks from other General Rotation playlists; tracks from a playlist with a higher weight will be played more frequently than tracks from a playlist with a lower weight. You can use this to ensure that, for example, new releases (in one playlist) are played more frequently than older tracks (in another playlist).

Example

As an example, let’s assume you want to set up your station to play ten (10) “top 40” tracks per hour, four (4) “classic” tracks per hour, and one (1) “oldies” track per hour, on average. To accomplish this, you might create the following three playlists:

Top 40             Weight: 10
Classic            Weight: 4
Oldies             Weight: 1

With this configuration, regardless of the number of tracks in each playlist, the selection of tracks played from each playlist will always match the weighting you have configured.

Note: The weight values don’t actually correspond to “tracks per hour” — the above example just assumes roughly 15 tracks per hour based on a 4-minute average track length. Weights are actually just a relative measure used to indicate how often you want each playlist to be used relative to the others and don’t have any special significance beyond that. So for example, you would see identical results if you had used weights of 100/40/10 instead of 10/4/1.