An interactive tour of RadioHost Studio
An interactive guided tour of RadioHost Studio — media library, playlists, clockwheels, scheduling, voice tracks, the browser live studio, analytics and the website integration. No account needed.
An interactive guided tour of RadioHost Studio — media library, playlists, clockwheels, scheduling, voice tracks, the browser live studio, analytics and the website integration. No account needed.
Every word of the guided tour, written out — useful if you would rather read than watch, or if you are looking for the one screen you came here about. Each heading takes you into the tour at that step.
What you are about to see, and how long it takes.
The whole platform, end to end. About twelve minutes.
This is RadioHost Studio — the whole product, not a highlight reel. It plays through on its own; the arrows at the bottom move you between scenes at your own pace. We start with what takes a station from an empty library to on air.
Library, playlist, clock, show, schedule — the order that works.
Everything the station is doing, on one screen.
This is your Overview — the page you leave open. It answers the one question that matters at three in the morning: is the station still running, and if it is not, what stopped it.
Three columns and a skip button.
Here is the card you will actually watch: what just played, what is on air, and what is queued behind it. A track is playing, AutoDJ chose it, and there are two minutes left of it. If you ever need to get rid of something quickly, skip track is right there, and it takes effect on the stream rather than just on the screen.
What has to be true before you leave it alone.
The launch checklist on the right is the one to trust. It is not a progress bar for its own sake. It lists the checks that decide whether AutoDJ can run without surprises: is there a stream, is there playable audio, is there a rotation to fall back on, does the week hold together. Work through it and the station will not surprise you at three in the morning.
Drag and drop straight into the library.
Start with the Media Library. Drag in up to fifty M P three files at a time. Every one is measured on the way in — loudness, peaks, where the song actually starts — so the station can segue them without you touching a fader. Your storage meter sits at the top and tells you how much room is left.
The one tag that changes how a file gets used.
Everything is tagged in place: click a title, an artist or a genre in the table and edit it right there. Kind matters more than it looks. Mark your jingles, sweepers and beds as jingles rather than tracks, because the clock pulls those from a different place, and a sweeper that thinks it is a song will turn up in the middle of your rotation.
Problems are flagged, never quietly fixed.
Watch the review flags. Every upload is checked on the way in — silence at the head, clipping, a track you already own. Nothing is deleted and nothing is blocked; it is flagged, and you decide what happens to it. Work through that list before you build anything on top of the library.
Three or four is usually the whole list.
A playlist is a named group of tracks with rotation rules. Most stations need only a few. Daytime, overnight, and one for a specialist show. You are not building a running order here. You are telling the station which pool to draw from when it asks for a song.
Four numbers do most of the work.
The rules are what keep a small library sounding large. Artist separation stops the same voice arriving twice in ten minutes. Title separation stops the same song arriving twice in an afternoon. Weight decides how often this pool wins against the others. Set them once and the station stops sounding like a playlist on shuffle.
The idea the rest of the product hangs off.
Now the idea that makes the whole thing work: the clockwheel. It is an hour template — not a list of songs, but a repeating pattern that says what kind of thing plays next. A song pulled from a playlist, then a jingle, then an exact track, then a folder or an external stream or a talk break. The station repeats that hour and draws fresh material every time, so it never runs dry and never sounds like a loop.
One real hour, slot by slot.
Here is a real one. The weather at the top of the hour, pinned to zero zero. The station identity chained straight after it. Then a song from Daytime, a jingle from anywhere in the library, a voice track, two more songs, and a promo. Slots drag into whatever order you want them in.
The difference between scheduled and on time.
A slot pinned to a minute is one the clock lands on exactly. Back timing is what makes that true rather than approximate: it fades the record down so the news actually opens on the hour, instead of two minutes past. And when a gap is too short for any song you own, the clock reaches into a folder of jingles and sweepers rather than going quiet.
A clock, wrapped in something a listener recognises.
A show attaches a clock to a name, a description and artwork. The Morning Mix. The Lunch Break. This is what your listeners see and what your website publishes, and it is the unit the schedule places on the week. The page tells you plainly if a show has nothing behind it yet.
Seven days, and nothing left uncovered.
The weekly grid. Drop your shows where they belong, in your station's own timezone. The colour tells you the kind: playlist, clock, live, relay or rerun. Anything you do not cover falls through to AutoDJ, so there is never dead air. Even an empty grid still produces a radio station.
One button, run before you leave.
Before you walk away, press validate. It checks the week for overlaps, for shows pointing at a clock you have since emptied, and for the gaps that would land on the wrong hour after a clock change. It is thirty seconds that saves you a phone call on a Sunday.
Voice tracks, the browser studio, and the people you let near it.
Recorded in a browser, aired like a live link.
Voice tracks are how you sound live when you are not. Record your link in the browser over the end of one song and the start of the next, and hear the crossfade while you are recording it, so you know exactly where to come out. Trim it, warm it up, and queue it for tomorrow. If you would rather bring in an M P three you already have, that tab works the same way.
Once, or every time the pool comes round.
Then decide where it plays. Attach it to a whole playlist or to a single show. Put it before a track, after a track, or hand it to the clock as a talk break. The clock has a talk break slot that plays whatever is waiting, and if nothing is queued it simply moves on to the next slot. Nobody hears a gap where your link would have been.
Nothing to install, nothing to configure.
When you do want to be live, the studio is in your browser. Your microphone, two decks and eight jingle carts, all playing from the same library the automation uses. Nothing to install, no encoder settings to get wrong. Press go on air and you take over from AutoDJ. Go off air and it hands straight back, mid-song if it has to.
Two banks of four, loaded before you start.
Those eight carts are the difference between talking over a bed and fumbling for it. Two banks of four, each loaded from your library, each one click away for the whole show. The mixer beside them is a real mixer, with faders and mutes and pre-fade listen, so you can cue the next record in your headphones while the last one is still on air.
Presenters, without handing over the keys.
If other people present on your station, add them under Live Studio D Js. They are invited by email and sign in with a code, so there is no password to pass around. They see only the shows you give them, and they can never touch your library, your playlists or your schedule. Ten seats are included, and the history below shows who went on air and for how long.
For anyone who brings their own encoder.
Anyone who prefers their own broadcast software goes under External D Js instead. B U T T, Mixxx, or anything that speaks the Icecast source protocol. They get a username and a password for the software and nothing else — no login, no dashboard. You can see who is connected, and you can kick a session that has gone wrong without waiting for them to notice.
Who is listening, and everywhere the station shows up.
Counted, not modelled.
Analytics is measured from the stream itself, not estimated. Live listener count, sessions, unique listeners, and every spin the station has played. Change the range and the whole page moves with it, so a day and a month are one click apart.
The two figures your invoice is built from.
Two numbers here decide what you pay. Total listening hours against your monthly allowance, at the top, resetting on the first. And peak, which tells you how close you have come to your listener ceiling. Nobody enjoys finding out about either of those from an invoice, so they are the first thing on the page. Royalty reports export from here as well.
One connection, then it keeps itself in step.
If you run Radio Site Maker, copy the connection code from its dashboard and paste it here, once. Your shows and their weekly times come across, with their descriptions, pictures and presenters, and from then on your schedule stays in step automatically. If you already have a site full of shows, import them rather than typing them twice.
For the sites you do not control.
For any site that is not your own, there are widgets. A player, a schedule, a recently played list and a request box. Set the accent, the background and the corner radius to match wherever it is going, watch the preview change as you do it, and copy the one line of embed code. Anyone can view these — there is no login involved.
Yesterday's show, still earning next month.
A show you scheduled can be recorded automatically, and the recordings land here. Publish the good ones as episodes and Studio serves a proper podcast feed that any podcast app can subscribe to. Your website can present the same archive, which turns every episode into a page worth finding.
Listeners ask; you decide.
Everything your listeners ask for arrives on Song Requests, from the request widget on your site. Only tracks already in your library can be requested, so nothing unexpected can reach your rotation, and nothing airs until you approve it. Approve one and AutoDJ plays it at the next opportunity that fits the programming. The count in the sidebar keeps ticking while you work somewhere else.
Audio that lives at somebody else's address.
Some of what your station plays is not yours to upload. A weather forecast is regenerated every hour at a fixed address; a news feed runs continuously somewhere else. Register those addresses here and a clock can pin one to the top of the hour. Nothing is stored and nothing counts against your storage — the audio is fetched at the moment it airs.
For a system that needs to read, not write.
If another system needs to read what your station is doing — a display in the studio, a reporting spreadsheet, a site somebody else built — issue it a key here. It is read only: a key can see your station and can never change it. The now-playing feed needs no key at all, because it is meant to be embedded.
The settings that matter, what you pay for, and where the answers are.
Name, timezone, bitrate, crossfade, recording retention and geo-blocking.
Settings holds the choices everything else depends on. Set the station name and the timezone before you build a serious schedule — every show time you place is in that timezone, and your website publishes them from it. Bitrate and crossfade shape the sound. Recording retention decides how long automatic show recordings are kept before they age out. Geo-blocking is there for when licensing makes you use it.
Four numbers, and a trial that includes all of them.
Your plan and billing link sits at the foot of the sidebar. A plan buys you four things: storage for the library, listening hours each month, a ceiling on how many people can be tuned in at once, and presenter seats. A trial gives you the whole product to build with — you only need a plan when you want the stream itself to go out.
Written for the screen you are stuck on.
And when something does not behave, Help Docs is in the sidebar of every page. There is an article for each screen, it is searchable, and the pages that tend to trip people up link straight into it from the spot where you got stuck.
Where to start.
Seven days, everything included, no card needed.
Library, playlist, clock, show, schedule. Work in that order and the station runs itself; everything after that is refinement. A trial gives you all of it for seven days, with nothing to install and no card to enter. Build your station, and turn the stream on when it sounds the way you want it to.