Organising your station's media with tags

What are tags

Tags in Radio Cult aren’t just labels - they’re one of the most powerful tools for keeping your station organised and making automation work for you.

Media organisation

Think of tags as a super-flexible filing system for your tracks. You can give any piece of media as many tags as you want, which makes it easy to:

• Filter and search your library,
• Group related files by genre, mood, show segment, or whatever else makes sense, and
• Find exactly what you need, even when your library’s overflowing.

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 intelligently pull and play matching media. This means you can skip the track-by-track curation. Just tag your media, link those tags to a playlist, and schedule it. Job done.

Tagging media

You can tag your media files in the Media page.

On your computer, open Radio Cult. Then click the Media button in the top navigation bar (Home > Media).

To tag a single media file:

1. Identify the media file (you can use the search bar and filters to help with this),

   Click the Tags cell for a media file you wish to tag, and

   From the Tags dropdown, click the appropriate tag. If you want to use a new tag:

   1. Click the Create tag button,
   2. Type the name of the tag,
   3. Click the Confirm (tick) button, and
   4. Then click the newly-created tag.

The tag will then be added to your selected media file.

Alternatively, to tag multiple media files in one go:

1. Select the media files you wish to tag,
2. Click the Add tags button in the bulk actions menu.
3. From the Tags dropdown, click the appropriate tag(s). Similar to step 3 above, you can also create and assign new tags here.

The tag(s) will then be added to your selected media files.

Searching media files by tag(s)

Searching your media by tags makes finding the tracks you’re after a breeze. Just select one or more tags, and boom - you get a filtered view showing only the appropriately-tagged tracks.

You can search your media files by tag(s) (and by other filters) in the Media page.

On your computer, open Radio Cult. Then click the Media button in the top navigation bar (Home > Media).

To search media files by tag(s):

1. Click the Tag filter dropdown, and
2. Click the tag(s) from the Tag filter dropdown.

You should now be seeing every media track you’ve tagged with the selected tag.

Adding tag(s) 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.

You can add tags to a playlist in the Playlists page.

On your computer, open Radio Cult. Then navigate to the Playlists page by clicking the Media button in the top navigation bar, and then the Playlists button in the side navigation bar (Home > Media > Playlists).

To add tag(s) to a playlist:

1. Click the playlist you wish to add the tag(s) to,
2. Click the Add tag button, and
3. From the Tags dropdown, click the appropriate tag(s).

The tag(s) will then be added to your selected playlist.

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 you wish, 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 piece of media with the CLASSICAL tag. Then it will keep repeating this process for the duration of the event the playlist is assigned to. It will also ensure for each subsequent track selection that a different CLASSICAL-tagged piece of media 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. In fact you only have to add one tag!

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 media file 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 Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. 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 media files. If you want both in your playlists, then have at it.