Clockwheels
Hour templates — an ordered sequence of playlist pulls, folder pulls, jingles, exact tracks, external streams and talk breaks.
No clocks yet
A clock is the shape of one hour — two songs, a jingle, the news, two more. Optional: without one, your rotation simply plays through.
Select a clock
Pick a clock on the left to design its hour.
Slots
How this hour plays
- Playlist pull — takes the set number of tracks from that playlist, following its rotation rules.
- Folder pull — takes the set number of items straight from a library folder, so a genre folder needs no playlist to mirror it. Least recently played first, no repeat inside 2 hours and no artist twice inside 45 minutes; use a playlist when you need to tune that. Voice tracks and recordings are never pulled.
- Jingle / sweeper — takes one from your jingle library: any of them, or only a chosen folder. Least recently played first, and nothing repeats inside 20 minutes.
- Exact track — always this one file.
- External stream — a bulletin at somebody else's URL, set up in External Streams. Fetched fresh every time it airs, so pinning one to :00 is how you put the weather or the news on the hour. If the URL is down the clock steps straight over it.
- Talk break — plays the next voice break queued for the show in the Voice Tracks studio. Nothing queued, and the clock moves straight on to the next slot.
- Ad break — plays up to the set number of spots from whichever campaigns are owed one, newest advertiser behind their booking first, and never the same advertiser twice in a row. Nothing owed, and the clock steps over it. Adding one takes this clock off the station-wide break times in Settings — you have said where the break goes, so those stand aside for the hours this clock runs. Leave it out and the station-wide times cover this hour as usual.
The hour repeats from the top, and drag reorders it. Set at :MM on a slot to pin it to a minute — the clock jumps to it at the first track boundary after that minute, once per hour, and it is reached only that way, never as part of the normal rotation. It never cuts into a track, and if it is more than 15 minutes late it waits for the next hour instead.
Start your pinned slots on time (back-timing)
Say you pin the news to :00. At 11:58 the next song is three minutes long, so it would still be playing at midnight. The clock never starts something that would run past a pin, so with this off the news opens early instead — at 11:58 this hour, at a different moment the next.
Switch this on and, as a pinned minute gets close, the clock lands on it in one item. A song that finishes before the minute plays whole; one that would run over is faded down onto the minute instead, the way an operator rides a record into the news.
It will not cut away more than half a song, and never leaves less than 15 seconds of one — below that it reaches for a filler instead, or opens the pinned slot a moment early. Jingles, voice tracks and ads are never cut. So you get one item landing on the minute, not a scramble of short jingles filling the last of it.
The box is how many minutes ahead it starts doing this. 0 turns it off. 5 is the usual setting. It does not change which songs are chosen — only what happens to the one that would run over. Make it at least as long as your longest song: one that starts before the window opens and would cross the minute is not faded, and the pinned slot opens early instead.
No slots yet — add the first one below.
Chain a slot to the one above when it should play only there — the ID that follows the weather, the sting after the news. Pin the first slot to its minute; chain what comes after it. Pinning both a minute apart leaves nothing in between and the station drops to its own rotation until the second minute arrives.
New clock
Preview
What this hour puts out, in order, from the minute you choose — using the slots as they are on the page right now, saved or not. The order and the rules are the AutoDJ’s; the minutes are estimates, because a pull picks a different track every time. Talk breaks are treated as empty.
Play this hour
Plays the sequence below in your browser with the joins the node makes on air. Nothing goes to air.
The preview assumes the clock takes over at the start minute with nothing aired yet that hour. Start at :55 to watch the run-in land a :00 pin: that is where back-timing fades a song down, reaches for a filler, or opens the pinned slot a moment early.