Clocks

Clocks define the structure of an hour. Instead of scheduling every track by hand, you build a reusable pattern: music, sweeper, talk break, music, jingle, and so on.

Build the hour shape

Add slots in the order they should play. Each slot can point at a playlist, a library folder, your jingles, a specific media item, an external stream, or a talk break. The lap summary shows how the clock adds up against the target hour.

Play the weather or the news on the hour

An External stream slot airs audio you do not host — a weather bulletin or a news feed published at somebody else's URL, set up under External Streams. Pin one to :00 and that is your news on the hour.

The audio is fetched at the moment it airs, never cached, so what goes out is whatever is at that address right then. If the URL is down when the slot comes round, the clock steps straight over it and plays the next slot — your station does not go quiet waiting for somebody else's server — and the failure is shown on the External Streams page.

Pull straight from a folder

A Folder pull takes the set number of items from one folder of your library, so a genre folder you have already filed does not need a playlist built to mirror it. It plays least recently played first, never repeats an item inside 2 hours, and never plays the same artist twice inside 45 minutes. Those figures are fixed — when you need to tune rotation, or combine several folders, use a playlist instead. Voice tracks and recordings are never pulled.

Use talk breaks with Voice Tracks

A Talk break slot pulls the next voice break queued for that show in Voice Tracks. If nothing is queued, the clock moves on. This lets presenters record links without rebuilding the clock.

Voice tracks attached to a playlist

A clock does not run a playlist — a playlist slot pulls one track at a time out of one. That distinction matters for voice tracks, because a link can be attached to a playlist rather than to a date: "play this intro before that song in Gold, every time".

By default such a link airs here too, so a song pulled into a clock slot is introduced exactly as it would be in a playlist show, and a break attached to that playlist fills this clock's talk-break slots. A presenter who wants a link kept out of clockwheel hours sets it to Not in clock shows when placing it, under Voice Tracks.

If a link you expected is missing from a clock hour, check that setting first — the placed voice-track list states it per row.

Pin a slot to a minute

Set at :MM on a slot and it airs at that minute of the hour instead of taking its turn in the rotation. The clock jumps to it at the first track boundary after that minute, once an hour, and it is reached only that way — never as part of the normal lap. Nothing is ever cut off part-way, so if a song is still playing at :00 the pinned slot waits for it to end. More than 15 minutes late and it gives up and waits for the next hour.

Leave at least one slot unpinned. A clock where every slot is pinned has no rotation to fill the time between them, so the station falls through to its general rotation playlists — and to the fallback behind them — for the rest of the hour. It will not go silent, but the hour stops sounding like the clock you designed.

Start pinned slots on time (back-timing)

Because a song is never cut off, a slot pinned to :00 actually opens at :02 or :03 — whenever the song that was playing at midnight happens to end — and at a different minute every hour. Back-timing fixes that.

Switch it on and, as a pinned minute gets close, the clock only picks songs short enough to finish before it. The last one ends by itself right on the minute. The setting is how many minutes ahead it starts doing this: 0 turns it off, 5 is the usual value. Earlier than that and your short songs get overplayed for no benefit; later and there is not enough time left to land cleanly.

Some gaps are 40 seconds when every song you have is three minutes. For those, pick a filler folder — a folder of jingles or sweepers — and the clock closes the gap with one of those. Leave it on "no filler" and the pinned slot simply starts late instead. It never goes silent either way.

Back-timing needs something to aim at: if no slot in the clock is pinned to a minute, it does nothing, and the designer says so.

Assign clocks to shows

After saving a clock, assign it from Shows or directly on a Schedule event. A clock does not broadcast by itself; it needs a scheduled slot.