Hello,
We are testing libretime to assess its implementation on our radio. For now all great, the only problem we have encountered is the rigidity of the duration of the shows.
For example, on many occasions podcasts exceed the time they have been assigned in the programming and their broadcast is cut when the time for the next show arrives.
Would it be possible to configure libretime to be more flexible?
If any audio exceeds the allotted time, wait until it ends to start the next show.
Unfortunately this isn’t something that can be changed super easy with the current setup. There has been discussion about this but it would require audio being cut off at some point.
Just for example DJ A has time slot of 1 hour but they schedule a 2 hour long track. DJ B has the slot following DJ A. Should their entire set be ignored because of DJ A’s mistake ? Also with top of the hour IDs required for broadcasts it can introduce additional challenges if we were to allow overloading of shows and then play the tracks. Even if you then played DJ B’s tracks DJ C who started after B will also get delayed. And then it can just go on indefinitely.
So it might make sense to allow something like a 5 minute flex-time between shows force a hand-off but this would require a reconfiguring of the way LibreTime is programmed and nobody has proposed the UI or how to handle this yet.
The only real way to solve this without modifying the code would be to schedule the various podcasts inside of one 24 hour show. It’ll still get cut off at midnight because LibreTime doesn’t allow more than 24 hour shows but you could have things more flexible in the meantime. It would be more challenging to manage but would be more flexible in terms of scheduling. You could break it up into different blocks as well, say 6 hour blocks as shows. That is the most reasonable way to handle things currently.
Hello,
Ok, I understand what you are saying. For our radio it is not a problem. We do not use the dj’s system, except some live program. The rest of the programs are downloaded from their respective podcasts. We try to keep people formal in the duration of their programs, but it is an impossible mission. If we get too hard, we would lose the opportunity to broadcast those shows for a few minutes that they sometimes take from the next show.
With the current system, Aras, we assume those small delays, even if they accumulate at a certain time, since they are corrected in the time bands that there is only music.
It would be great if in a future libretime I could integrate this functionality.
I think that many radios in the network of free and community radios in Spain would take it as automation software.
Still, we continue to test libretime with a parallel installation and will value the option of being more strict with the shows.
Yeah I’d say we’d need to modify LibreTime’s codebase to accomodate something like this.
There have been a few requests of similar issues - https://github.com/LibreTime/libretime/issues/1016 is mostly focused on resuming the podcast at point it was cut off in future shows (probably better for talk than music).
It looks like nobody has opened a specific feature request for allowing a show to overflow it’s time period so this might be worth adding to github as a point of discussion. No promises that anyone will code it but it gives us a better historical record of the idea and proposed solution.