If you use repeat it will just repeat the contents. You need to use a autoloading playlist that contains a random smart block and it will generate something new each time.
An autoloading smartblock is handy for simple cases, but at our station we need a stationID, maybe some PSAs, and the track that says “The following show is a repeat presentation”, so we auto-load a playlist that contains a smartblock to choose one random stationID, up to one minute of PSAs, the repeat presentation track, then a smartblock that selects the archived program for that timeslot, and finally the track that says “This has been a repeat presentation”.
So, having that level of indirection of autoloading Playlist->Smartblocks works really well for us. When we need to, it’s no bother to create an autoloading playlist that only contains one smartblock to load random content.
I’d like to be able to create a smartblock that goes “Track-Ident” in order (as we generally schedule saved shows which are 60mins) but does not repeat the same track within the Playlist. I can’t find any straightforward way to do it.
the use case is to provide an autoDJ when live shows are not available. I’ve got it working via Autoloading Playlists that include 2 smartblocks (show & Ident), but it does occassionally play the same pre-recorded show track twice in the playlist (which is repeated to the end of the slot).
Yeah, there is an option under Smart Blocks called “Allow Repeated Tracks” if this is not checked a smartblock should not select the same track twice but if you have multiple smart blocks they have no way of communicating with each other to avoid repeating at this point.
To avoid repeats in adjacent smartblocks I select under Advanced Options “Sort Tracks” by “Least Recently Played”. We have enough overlapping shows that use the tracks so that they don’t always play in the same order, eg. both the smartblocks for “CanCon” and “Jazz” might contain the same track, so any one smartblock gets a different play order from day to day.
I had the same logic in mind, I was testing this weekend this approach.
But when a playlist is loading the tracks, and the playlist is made of several smart blocks, the Least Recently Played is still taking tracks which were selected in the previous smart block. Most likely because during this process the last played date isn’t yet updated. It will be updated once it has actually played, I guess.
And it seems it is looking at track ID instead of Artist and/or Album. In some countries it is not allowed to play the same artist and/or album within a timeframe of one to four hours. For randomly created playlists it would be advisable to have some rules settings for this. Of course, manually created playlists is up to the DJ to apply or not for these rules…
We had a similar problem: Our smartblocks (based on genre) are only one hour in length, and the longer playlists (for overnight shows) contain a StationID, smartblock, StationID, smartblock, StationID, smartblock… and so forth. We were getting repeated tracks in consecutive smartblocks…
I once made a calculation: For any two consecutive hour-long smartblocks of the same genre to have less than .5 probability of duplicating even one track (at 20 tracks an hour) it needs a library with more than 800 tracks for that genre. More tracks in your library reduce the probabiliy of duplicate track in consecutive smartblocks.
This calculation was good impetus for our music department to upload more tracks (but that’s mostly me doing that work)
