Live Studio & deejays

Live Studio lets a presenter go on air from a browser tab — their microphone, two music decks and a wall of jingle carts, all playing from your library. There is no broadcast software to install and no stream settings to get wrong.

It is meant for the case External DJs is not: someone who presents for you but does not run your station, and should never be able to change your library, playlists or schedule.

Add a deejay

Open Live Studio DJs and add them by name and email. They get an invitation straight away.

There is no password to create or share. They sign in with the same six-digit code your own login uses, so a deejay who changes laptops or loses a phone simply signs in again — there is nothing for you to reset.

The Users page shows where each person stands:

• Invited — the invitation went out and they have not signed in yet.
• Active — they have signed in at least once, with the date of the last time.
• Disabled — they keep their history but cannot sign in.

Your plan includes a set number of deejay seats. Deactivating someone frees their seat; removing them entirely also unassigns their shows.

Put them on a show

In Schedule, create or open a live show, tick Live Studio, and pick the deejay. That is the whole of it — they are emailed immediately, then reminded a day before and again two hours before each airing.

A live show with no deejay assigned shows a warning in the schedule, because nobody can open the studio for it and it would fall through to your fallback.

When the studio opens

By default the studio unlocks ten minutes before the show starts and closes at the end (plus any overrun grace the show allows). Outside that window the Go On Air button is disabled, and the page says when their next slot is rather than leaving them guessing.

For a resident presenter who needs to jump in unannounced, switch on Go live any time against their name in Users. Use it sparingly: anyone with it can take the station off its schedule whenever they like.

Only one live source can be connected at a time. If an external DJ is already on air, Live Studio says so by name instead of failing quietly.

What a deejay can and cannot do

They see two pages: My Shows and Live Studio. Everything else in the product is closed to them — not merely hidden, but refused.

They can play anything in your library from the studio. They can also upload a limited number of their own tracks, which:

• only they can play, in Live Studio;
• are never picked by the AutoDJ, a playlist or a clock;
• count against your station's storage, because they are your bytes;
• can be edited or deleted only by them, to make room for others.

They cannot touch anything a station admin uploaded.

Inside the studio

Press Start studio — a browser will not start audio without a click, and it is where the microphone permission is asked for.

• Five faders: Mic, Track 1, Track 2, Jingle 1, Jingle 2. Opening the microphone

automatically ducks the other four, so a link over a bed does not need three hands.

• Two decks for music, loaded from the library. Each shows a countdown that turns

amber at fifteen seconds and red at five.

• Eight carts, saved against the presenter: carts 1–4 fire on Jingle 1, 5–8 on

Jingle 2. Firing a cart into a bank that is already playing replaces it, the way a cart machine always has. They survive a page reload, which is the point.

• A waveform with a playhead across the top, following whichever deck or cart

started most recently.

• A headphones fader that is separate from what goes to air.

Press Go on air when the studio is open. The lamp turns red, and the show's remaining time appears beside it.

Using a USB mic or an audio interface

Most USB microphones with a headphone socket, and every audio interface, are two devices at once: a microphone going in, and a sound card coming out. The headphone socket on them plays two things mixed together — your own voice, routed internally in analogue, and whatever the computer sends it.

That internal mic path never goes near the computer, so it has no delay at all. It is how every radio studio monitors, and it is better than anything a browser can do.

To set it up:

1. In Live Studio, set Headphone output to your microphone or interface. This

only moves what you hear — the broadcast is a separate audio path and is not affected by it.

1. Switch Hear yourself off. The hardware is already giving you your voice with

no delay; leaving this on means hearing yourself twice, slightly apart, which is worse than either on its own.

1. If your device has a Mix, Blend or Direct/USB control, set it around

the middle. That is the balance between your voice and the music. Some devices set this in their companion app instead of on the hardware.

The music and jingles then reach the same headphones as your voice, and the Headphones fader in Live Studio sets how loud they are against it.

If Headphone output is greyed out, your browser cannot choose one (Chrome and Edge can; Firefox and Safari cannot). Set the device as your computer's default output instead — the effect is the same.

The mixer, control by control

Five faders. Microphone, Track 1, Track 2, Jingle 1 and Jingle 2. The microphone starts closed — every other channel starts open, so pressing Play makes a sound. Opening the mic automatically ducks the other four so a link over a bed does not need three hands.

M mutes a channel without moving its fader, so you can find your way back to the level you had.

PFL (pre-fade listen) sends a channel to your headphones *before* the fader, so you can audition something with the fader shut and nothing reaching air. While a deck is cued, the on-air mix dims in your headphones to get out of the way. Because PFL is pre-fader, the channel fader and the master deliberately do not change what you are cueing — that is what makes it useful.

Master rides everything on its way out, from silence to +6 dB, with unity marked. It affects your headphones as well as the broadcast, so what you hear is what you are sending.

Output is a real meter. The bar is RMS — loudness as the ear hears it — with a peak-hold marker and a CLIP lamp. It is scaled in decibels, so a healthy −8 dBFS reads as a nearly full bar rather than a worryingly empty one. Green to −6, amber to −1, red above.

Decks, carts and the waveform

The waveform across the top follows whichever channel started most recently. Click a deck panel to pin it there, and click again to release.

• Click the waveform to seek.
• Shift-click to set your own start point, marked in cyan. Stop returns

there instead of to the beginning.

• Double-click to clear it.

Your start point lives in the page for that session only. It never changes the track's cue points in the library — those are the trim every listener hears on every play, and coming in eight bars late tonight should not rewrite them.

Each deck shows a countdown. It turns amber at fifteen seconds and red at five, and it is exact, because it is measured on the audio clock rather than a timer.

Carts are eight slots: 1–4 fire on Jingle 1, 5–8 on Jingle 2. Firing a cart into a bank that is already playing replaces it, the way a cart machine always has. They are saved to your account, so a page reload mid-show brings your imaging back.

Hearing yourself

Hear yourself puts your microphone in your headphones. It is off by default and it is for headphones only — on open speakers it will feed back.

It is taken from the raw microphone, ahead of the processing that goes to air, so it is the fastest path the browser can offer. There is still a small delay, and the panel tells you how big it is. That delay is in your headphones only; what goes to air is never affected by it.

To remove it completely, use hardware monitoring — see the section above.

Going on air

Press Go on air. The lamp turns red and the show's remaining time appears beside it.

Only one live source can be connected at a time, so if an external DJ is already on air the studio says so by name rather than failing silently. Live Studio replaces the automated stream while you are on and hands it back when you stop — your listeners never change URL.

If the connection drops, the mixer keeps playing locally and reconnects by itself; the lamp turns amber while it does. If it cannot recover, automation takes over within seconds. That is also what happens if you close the tab, so a scheduled playlist underneath a live show is always worth having.

Everything a presenter plays is written to the play log, so now-playing, your website, the widgets and your reports stay correct during a live show.

Things worth telling your presenter

Headphones are not optional. Their microphone goes to air but deliberately not to their own speakers — if it did, the speakers would feed straight back into the microphone.

There is a delay. What they hear on the decks is a few seconds ahead of what listeners hear. The countdown on a deck is their clock, not the audience's, which is exactly what they want when timing a link.

If the browser dies, the station does not. Closing the tab, losing Wi-Fi or a flat battery ends the live source, and automation picks up within seconds. It is worth having a playlist scheduled underneath a live show for that reason.