|
Separation controls the rate at which your pool of available audio files are repeated. In an ideal world you would have so many stored audio files on your hard drive that any single item would not be played again, although this would not always be desirous in terms of advertising or particular station identifications that you want to bring to the continuous attention of your listeners. To this end, rather than adopting a "no-repeat" policy Robot gives you the opportunity to control exactly how and when audio files are repeat played.
A separation is the time during which a particular sound file in each of the relevant categories will be embargoed or with-held from being played again. When a sound file is played the time and date and its name is placed into the master embargo file with the date and time the embargo stops. This file will not be available to the system for selection until it is cleared from the embargo file. You have the option to setup each type of item (song, id, ad, comedy, talk etc.) to a relevant setting. If you don't want to embargo any files at all (or maybe just the song files) simply set the separation to '0' (or no separation) for those items. This will not sound very good as the same item may be repeated twice in an hour or possibly even worse many times. There is no alternative "hard-set" repeat protection in Robot, so without a separation setting you may get disastrous results. On the other hand if you have literally thousands of sound files in each item category it is 'possible' that you may never get a repeat with a separation setting of '0'. only possible...try this at your own risk! Naturally if you have a particular type of item (say COMEDY) switched off (i.e. you are not using it) you need not bother setting a separation level for it unless you are very keen or think you may use the item at a later date and forget to also reset the separation level at that time.
A common mistake is to set a separation setting two high, perhaps optimistically hoping for a constantly fresh sound. Most settings are totally dependant upon how many audio files you have accessible to robot in the first place. Use only large separations if you have enough files to cover the time allocated. Its no good embargoing every song for 90 days once its played, if you only have 100 SONG audio files available to the system. In these circumstances the separation will go into error and may repeat - you won't get dead air, but sound files will be repeated. Set a realistic separation. The term error refers to the process, not the software. It will not stop, but if you are watching on the On-Air screen you will see the word ERROR appear in the separation area. This means the software looped through all of the available audio files past the loop limit setting (adjustable on the setup screen) and couldn't find any files that were not embargoed to select from. Hence the software just plays the first audio file it encounters (whether it is listed as embargoed or not) so that you don't get dead air. Continuing over an hour you will constantly get the ERROR message and all type of horrible repeat sequences may occur.
|
|
