PLG Pro - Tags - Media Management
- Thread starter dave-t
- Start date
radiodungog
Member
Dmitry,
Great news, thanks ...
I'm in the process of nutting out the standard tags we will use in the "Comment" field to make our life easier. Do the hard work with tagging now and reap the rewards forever.
We still use the scheduler to call the old playlist generator to assemble a playlist on the fly and put it to air. This is still a very powerful feature. From memory the Playlist Generator Pro is designed to be operated by a human and not automatically by the scheduler ...
Thanks, Jamie C.
Great news, thanks ...
I'm in the process of nutting out the standard tags we will use in the "Comment" field to make our life easier. Do the hard work with tagging now and reap the rewards forever.
We still use the scheduler to call the old playlist generator to assemble a playlist on the fly and put it to air. This is still a very powerful feature. From memory the Playlist Generator Pro is designed to be operated by a human and not automatically by the scheduler ...
Thanks, Jamie C.
Playlist Generator Pro can be used for automatic generation by schedule as well: http://manual.djsoft.net/radioboss/en/automatic_playlist_generation.htmradiodungog said:
Yes. But note that old Playlist Generator treats comments in a different way than Pro version does. I'd suggest moving towards PG Pro and prepare tags to be used there.radiodungog said:
radiodungog
Member
Dmitry,
Ah really ? I'll give PG Pro a try with the scheduler. I didn't realise it could be called by the scheduler too.
Thanks, Jamie C.
Ah really ? I'll give PG Pro a try with the scheduler. I didn't realise it could be called by the scheduler too.
Thanks, Jamie C.
radiodungog
Member
Dmitry,
What is the best method (quickest and most bulletproof) of auto-generating a playlist for RadioBOSS which has some complex requirements ? Like the following details that might be inserted into PG Pro:
1. One song Easy Listening 1960s
2. One song Easy Listening 1970s
3. One song Easy Listening 1980s
4. One track Radio Dungog ID Promo
5. One song Easy Listening 1990s
6. One song Australian
7. One song Australian Country
8. One track Radio Dungog ID Promo
9. No repeat artists, no repeat songs
10. For play time of 12 hours
And in terms of do we do all the queries above with PG Pro based on meta-data info of all our songs (library is currently > 200,000 songs) OR do manually prepare the 6 different criteria using the search database and some filtering and put that into 6 master playlists .... then use that for a final assembly process using PG Pro ?
I'm thinking the numbers involved would be roughly:
a) Total songs in library database = 200,000 songs
b) Total songs in each of the 6 playlists matching the selection criteria above = 500-700 songs
c) Total songs in resulting 12 hour playlist generated by PG Pro = 180 songs + 90 ID Promos
Do you understand what I mean ?
Thanks, Jamie C.
What is the best method (quickest and most bulletproof) of auto-generating a playlist for RadioBOSS which has some complex requirements ? Like the following details that might be inserted into PG Pro:
1. One song Easy Listening 1960s
2. One song Easy Listening 1970s
3. One song Easy Listening 1980s
4. One track Radio Dungog ID Promo
5. One song Easy Listening 1990s
6. One song Australian
7. One song Australian Country
8. One track Radio Dungog ID Promo
9. No repeat artists, no repeat songs
10. For play time of 12 hours
And in terms of do we do all the queries above with PG Pro based on meta-data info of all our songs (library is currently > 200,000 songs) OR do manually prepare the 6 different criteria using the search database and some filtering and put that into 6 master playlists .... then use that for a final assembly process using PG Pro ?
I'm thinking the numbers involved would be roughly:
a) Total songs in library database = 200,000 songs
b) Total songs in each of the 6 playlists matching the selection criteria above = 500-700 songs
c) Total songs in resulting 12 hour playlist generated by PG Pro = 180 songs + 90 ID Promos
Do you understand what I mean ?
Thanks, Jamie C.
I'd just created Music Library files (or playlists) for each category, eg. a list of "Easy Listening 1960s" another list with "Easy Listening 1970s", a list for station ID's and so on.
Those lists are not going to be changed in the future so preparing those is a one-time job.
Then just use those lists in PGP as track sources for a category. On Settings tab in PGP select no-repeat options and set playlist duration on Structure tab.
The general idea is: instead of having one huge Music Library and apply filters to get only a small subset of tracks out of it, it's better have several specialized Libraries for each track category.
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Those lists are not going to be changed in the future so preparing those is a one-time job.
Then just use those lists in PGP as track sources for a category. On Settings tab in PGP select no-repeat options and set playlist duration on Structure tab.
The general idea is: instead of having one huge Music Library and apply filters to get only a small subset of tracks out of it, it's better have several specialized Libraries for each track category.
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
radiodungog
Member
Dmitry,
You have answered my question perfectly. That's exactly the answer I was after.
So following on from that if we define several categories of music and create a playlist for each one is there a way to reprocess them with the click of a single button ? Or must we process them manually ?
I'm thinking as we add more and more CDs to our music library we will need to refresh these master playlists each time.
Currently we use a Vortexbox to rip CDs and store the music. Sometimes we rip CDs one at a time and other times we rip them in batches of 100 CDs or more. Part of our batch ripping process is to review the artist, album and track titles and check the meta-tags manually and with BLISS prior to adding them to the master collection. Once they are checked and added to the master collection and transcoded from FLAC to MP3 (we store the CD masters as FLAC and transcode to MP3 for playing) then that is the time we should "refresh" our master category playlists ....
There is so much we need to do to add new CDs to our music library and extra step or two is not going to take much more time.
Thanks, Jamie C.
You have answered my question perfectly. That's exactly the answer I was after.
So following on from that if we define several categories of music and create a playlist for each one is there a way to reprocess them with the click of a single button ? Or must we process them manually ?
I'm thinking as we add more and more CDs to our music library we will need to refresh these master playlists each time.
Currently we use a Vortexbox to rip CDs and store the music. Sometimes we rip CDs one at a time and other times we rip them in batches of 100 CDs or more. Part of our batch ripping process is to review the artist, album and track titles and check the meta-tags manually and with BLISS prior to adding them to the master collection. Once they are checked and added to the master collection and transcoded from FLAC to MP3 (we store the CD masters as FLAC and transcode to MP3 for playing) then that is the time we should "refresh" our master category playlists ....
There is so much we need to do to add new CDs to our music library and extra step or two is not going to take much more time.
Thanks, Jamie C.
radiodungog
Member
Dave,
Apart from the standard meta-tags included in the track (artist, album, track, date, genre) we are looking to add our "magic" to the "Comments" tag so our master category playlists are exactly the type of songs we want with no mistakes or errors. This really means we have to do most of it manually.
This weekend we have created a few master category playlists - by no means extensive as yet - and we're running them on air and the station sounds a heap better than ever before.
With some more work on manually categorising each track (even if we only add an AP in the meta-data "Comment" field to signify "Approved" for airplay) we will be able to increase the number of tracks we broadcast and then filter them with additional strings like "AP Cat#AC BB#1980 May PR#10 TI#15 " which might signify:
AP = approved to play
Cat#AC = Category = Adult Contemporary (Easy Listening)
BB#1980 = Billboard chart date = 1980 May
PR#10 = Position reached = number 10
TI#15 = Time in chart = 15 weeks
Largely our filtering would be most influenced by:
AP
Cat#AC
BB#1980
The chart position and time in the charts is mainly of interest to the presenter
Jamie C.
Apart from the standard meta-tags included in the track (artist, album, track, date, genre) we are looking to add our "magic" to the "Comments" tag so our master category playlists are exactly the type of songs we want with no mistakes or errors. This really means we have to do most of it manually.
This weekend we have created a few master category playlists - by no means extensive as yet - and we're running them on air and the station sounds a heap better than ever before.
With some more work on manually categorising each track (even if we only add an AP in the meta-data "Comment" field to signify "Approved" for airplay) we will be able to increase the number of tracks we broadcast and then filter them with additional strings like "AP Cat#AC BB#1980 May PR#10 TI#15 " which might signify:
AP = approved to play
Cat#AC = Category = Adult Contemporary (Easy Listening)
BB#1980 = Billboard chart date = 1980 May
PR#10 = Position reached = number 10
TI#15 = Time in chart = 15 weeks
Largely our filtering would be most influenced by:
AP
Cat#AC
BB#1980
The chart position and time in the charts is mainly of interest to the presenter
Jamie C.
radiodungog
Member
Dave, Dmitry,
Wow ! A scheduled update for the library ! Wow ! That is very good.
Good night from Australia where it is nearly 30 minutes past midnight.
Thanks, Jamie C.
Wow ! A scheduled update for the library ! Wow ! That is very good.
Good night from Australia where it is nearly 30 minutes past midnight.
Thanks, Jamie C.
radiodungog
Member
Dmitry, Dave,
If we used the "Comment" tags as shown above is there a format for tag name and tag detail that might work better than others ?
For example:
BB#1980 May
BB=1980 May
BB-1980 May
BB[1980 May]
Remembering that we will have several tags in that "Comment" field. And with that in mind we probably have to have a tag name for everything included there like:
AP ... should not be entered as straight AP but probably:
Status#AP
Status#NA = not approved
Status# = not rated yet
Is this reasonable logic ?
Jamie C.
If we used the "Comment" tags as shown above is there a format for tag name and tag detail that might work better than others ?
For example:
BB#1980 May
BB=1980 May
BB-1980 May
BB[1980 May]
Remembering that we will have several tags in that "Comment" field. And with that in mind we probably have to have a tag name for everything included there like:
AP ... should not be entered as straight AP but probably:
Status#AP
Status#NA = not approved
Status# = not rated yet
Is this reasonable logic ?
Jamie C.
dave-t
New member
The way that RB uses the tags is to separate them by commas
So I think the syntax would be something like
REQUIRED AP, NOT NA, .......
Not having ever used <=> I am not 100% sure what the syntax would be.
I would suggest taking a dozen tracks, tag them then play with PLGPro to see if you get the desired effect.
If you use the date field properly you would not need the year or decade in the comments field as PLGPro can filter on dates already in a FROM TO format
The way I use the comment field is very simple in comparrison to yours
So I think the syntax would be something like
REQUIRED AP, NOT NA, .......
Not having ever used <=> I am not 100% sure what the syntax would be.
I would suggest taking a dozen tracks, tag them then play with PLGPro to see if you get the desired effect.
If you use the date field properly you would not need the year or decade in the comments field as PLGPro can filter on dates already in a FROM TO format
The way I use the comment field is very simple in comparrison to yours
radiodungog
Member
Dave,
Where the meta-data tag already has a name like "artist", "album", "title", "year" or "genre" it is easy to throw in some text because we know the text relates to that title. But in the "Comments" field it's pretty much open format for us to decide how we enter the info.
The ONLY reason for putting in the field names before the data in our case is to give a presenter some extra info to talk about during a live show. Of course we could stick a bit of paper on the LCD screen to explain the decode of what all the "Comments" data means - but we might end up with "Post It" notes all over the place and that would be untidy.
As Dmitry said, it's best to pre-process all this stuff and throw it into categorised playlists then let PG Pro do the final assembly for the onair mix.
So the way I see it happening for us is that we go into the music library xml database and do a search for Status#AP then save that result to a new database called Approved.
Then open that Approved database and search for 196 being all years in the 1960s and save that to a database. Do the same for 197 ..... and so on.
This is my way of doing a multi field search but using a few stages.
If multi word searches are available now or in the future I would amend my strategy to:
Status#AP BB#196 Cat#AC ... (adult contemporary)
And the results for that should be those songs we have approved from the 1960s that are adult contemporary ... and those results would be saved to a playlist labelled accordingly.
Same with the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s ....
And as we rip more CDs and manually check and classify them we can run through the process again to update the playlists. We would probably process the filter update only once per month if we have to do it manually - or once a week if it was possible to schedule it to be done automatically.
Certainly having some scheduled process running automatically in the background would be of great benefit and eliminate the "human" factor of forgetting to do it.
The other thing that I am working on is a method of knowing what new CDs have been ripped and added to the music library and somehow creating a monthly printout of the new additions so that our "music skilled" presenters can mark up the list with "Approved to Play" tracks and they can be tagged accordingly.
The successful management of the music library is a mission critical task and it will be a good feeling to know that it's all under control. At Radio Dungog we probably play a maximum of 2,500 songs over a 7 day period and we need to be serious about those songs being the right ones for our audience.
Thanks, Jamie C.
Where the meta-data tag already has a name like "artist", "album", "title", "year" or "genre" it is easy to throw in some text because we know the text relates to that title. But in the "Comments" field it's pretty much open format for us to decide how we enter the info.
The ONLY reason for putting in the field names before the data in our case is to give a presenter some extra info to talk about during a live show. Of course we could stick a bit of paper on the LCD screen to explain the decode of what all the "Comments" data means - but we might end up with "Post It" notes all over the place and that would be untidy.
As Dmitry said, it's best to pre-process all this stuff and throw it into categorised playlists then let PG Pro do the final assembly for the onair mix.
So the way I see it happening for us is that we go into the music library xml database and do a search for Status#AP then save that result to a new database called Approved.
Then open that Approved database and search for 196 being all years in the 1960s and save that to a database. Do the same for 197 ..... and so on.
This is my way of doing a multi field search but using a few stages.
If multi word searches are available now or in the future I would amend my strategy to:
Status#AP BB#196 Cat#AC ... (adult contemporary)
And the results for that should be those songs we have approved from the 1960s that are adult contemporary ... and those results would be saved to a playlist labelled accordingly.
Same with the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s ....
And as we rip more CDs and manually check and classify them we can run through the process again to update the playlists. We would probably process the filter update only once per month if we have to do it manually - or once a week if it was possible to schedule it to be done automatically.
Certainly having some scheduled process running automatically in the background would be of great benefit and eliminate the "human" factor of forgetting to do it.
The other thing that I am working on is a method of knowing what new CDs have been ripped and added to the music library and somehow creating a monthly printout of the new additions so that our "music skilled" presenters can mark up the list with "Approved to Play" tracks and they can be tagged accordingly.
The successful management of the music library is a mission critical task and it will be a good feeling to know that it's all under control. At Radio Dungog we probably play a maximum of 2,500 songs over a 7 day period and we need to be serious about those songs being the right ones for our audience.
Thanks, Jamie C.
Jamie, I'd suggest you to follow dave-t offer and test the approach before processing thousands of tracks
Regarding the Comment files. The way it's used in RB/PLGenPro is similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)
Each music track has its "tag words" assigned through a Comment field, for example:
Track 1: "80s, Top 40, AP"
Track 2: "90s, Top 10"
In PGP you can select tracks using Comment filter eg "REQUIRE AP, 80s, 90s, Top 10, Top 40" - this will select all approved tracks from 80s, 90s which were in Top 10 or Top 40. From the 2 tracks above, it will select only the first track.
dave-t said:
Regarding the Comment files. The way it's used in RB/PLGenPro is similar to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)
Each music track has its "tag words" assigned through a Comment field, for example:
Track 1: "80s, Top 40, AP"
Track 2: "90s, Top 10"
In PGP you can select tracks using Comment filter eg "REQUIRE AP, 80s, 90s, Top 10, Top 40" - this will select all approved tracks from 80s, 90s which were in Top 10 or Top 40. From the 2 tracks above, it will select only the first track.
radiodungog
Member
Dmitry,
That makes it very easy to filter. Excellent !
We might make make the strings a bit longer than that so they are plain English and more user friendly for the presenters ... to give them something at their fingertips to mention between songs.
This is going to be so good.
Thanks Dmitry !
Jamie C.
That makes it very easy to filter. Excellent !
We might make make the strings a bit longer than that so they are plain English and more user friendly for the presenters ... to give them something at their fingertips to mention between songs.
This is going to be so good.
Thanks Dmitry !
Jamie C.
radiodungog
Member
Dave,
How did your dad end up with a CD collection of 15,000 CDs ? Does it include ones he bought new and used ? That seems like an amazing number of CDs ...
Jamie C.
How did your dad end up with a CD collection of 15,000 CDs ? Does it include ones he bought new and used ? That seems like an amazing number of CDs ...
Jamie C.
dave-t
New member
My dad has been collecting "records" since he was about 10 years old - so that would be 1942. He is very much a collector and does not give anything away.
Al of his original 78s were either digitally recorded or replaced and he has been collecting CD's since they first appeared on the scene.
Despite his "obsessive" collecting habits I have still provided him with missing tracks recently which I found on iTunes !
Al of his original 78s were either digitally recorded or replaced and he has been collecting CD's since they first appeared on the scene.
Despite his "obsessive" collecting habits I have still provided him with missing tracks recently which I found on iTunes !