3. Automating your station's broadcast

So you know what a tag and how to use them fully. Or do you?

In the previous help article, we teased that tags serve an important purpose beyond keeping your media library nice and tidy. That other purpose was broadcast automation. Well, now it’s time to make good on that promise and show you the true power of tags.

As a recap, here’s what we said about using tags for broadcast automation:

Tags aren’t just for tidying up - they can also run your broadcasts for you. You can assign tags to playlists so that, when the playlist runs, your station will randomly pull and play matching media. This means you can skip the track-by-track curation. Just tag your tracks, link those tags to a playlist, and schedule it. Job done.

In this guide, you’ll learn about all the features we support to make automating your station’s broadcast a breeze. Once you’re finished with this help article you’ll be comfortable with the following:

1. How to use tags to automate your station’s broadcast, and
2. What are event intros and how to add one to an event.

Enough preamble, let’s get into the nitty gritty!

Adding your first tag to a playlist

Tags by themselves are only useful when it comes to organising your media library. Tags when added to playlists are the winning combination when it comes to broadcast automation.

We’ll explain what effect adding a tag to any playlist has on what is broadcast from your station’s stream in the next section. For now, where just going to show you how to add a tag to a playlist.

1. In the left hand navigation, click Playlists under the Media section.

2. Click the playlist you want to add a tag to.

3. Click the tag icon (its tooltip reads Add tags).

4. Click the tag you want to add to the playlist.

Nice one - your first tag has been added to a playlist. Read on to find out why we had you do that.

What does adding a tag to a playlist actually do

Well, before we answer that crucial question, let’s make a couple of things clear:

1. A playlist can include as many different tags as your heart desires, and
2. The same tag can be added to a playlist multiple times.

With that out of the way, let’s use a couple of examples to demonstrate what adding a tag to a playlist actually does:

Say your playlist is structured in the following way:

So when this playlist starts being broadcasted, your streaming server will “randomly” choose a track with the CLASSICAL tag for the first tag entry. Then it will repeat this process for each subsequent CLASSICAL tag entry. It will also ensure for each subsequent tag entry that a different CLASSICAL-tagged track will be broadcasted (where possible).

As you can see, this allows you to set the tone of the playlist, without having to individually curate every individual track within it.

Let’s move on to a slightly more complex example. Say you have another playlist which looks like this:

For this particular playlist, your streaming server will again “randomly” choose a track tagged with STING to begin the broadcast. This is useful if you want the broadcast to open with a musical phrase or sound effect unique to your station. It will then specifically broadcast Gansu- Drax. The rest of the broadcast will play out just like the previous example, as again there are 3 CLASSICAL tag entries one after the other.

We demonstrated this sort of the playlist structure for the following reasons:

1. To show how easy tags make it to include your stations' stings at the beginning of a show. Though the world’s your oyster - you could include this STING tag or multiple copies of it at any point during the playlist.
2. To make abundantly clear that a playlist doesn’t have to contain only tag entries or only tracks. If you want both in your playlists, then have at it.

What are event intros and how to add one to an event

Now you may be wondering what happens if I have an upcoming event where:

1. I only want to broadcast a single track - say a pre-recorded 1 hour DJ set, and
2. I want the event to begin with a sting, message or jingle.

Do I have to go through the hassle of including a single track and the relevant tag in a playlist to get this to work? Well, fear not because this hypothetical hassle only exists in your imagination. Let us introduce you to the wonders of event intros.

Any pre-record or playlist event can have an intro. An intro plays once at the start of an event. It can be a specific track or a tag. If you select a tag, then your streaming server will play one random track from that tag.

Let’s show you how to add an intro to an event similar to the example we just mentioned:

1. In the left hand navigation, click Schedule.

2. Click any time on the calendar.

• Tip: drag down the calendar as you select to create a longer event.

3. Enter a Title for the event.

4. In the Media section, click Pre-record, then select the track to broadcast.

5. Click Advanced, then open the Intro dropdown.

6. In the Select tracks window, choose your intro:

• For a tag intro, click the Tags tab, then click the tag you want (we’ll play one random track from it).
• For a specific track, on the Media tab, click the track you want.

7. Click the Create event button.

Nicely done - you’ve now created your first event with an intro.

With that all said and done, you should now be familiar with the crucial features we support in automating your station’s broadcast. We’ll now leave it up to you to automate your station how you please.

By now we’d like to think you’re no longer a beginner with the platform. Amongst other things, you’ve created some events, you’ve added some tracks and you’ve added some tags. But all this new knowledge will be for nothing, if your listeners can’t actually listen to your station’s stream. So click here to learn how to set up your embed player.