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Scheduling an hourly break

  • Updated

Do you want to announce the time during your radio broadcast? Perfect, you've come to the right place!

To do this, you will need to schedule an hourly break with your time signal. A time signal is a special call sign broadcast at regular intervals (every hour) that announces the time and the name of the radio station.


Create an hourly break
Schedule an hourly break

CREATE AN HOURLY BREAK

If you wish to create and customize your time signal, we invite you to create it via Audacity which is an audio recording and editing software.
It is important that each time signal is recorded in a separate file from midnight to 11pm.

Top Tip: We invite you to rename your files with the announced time so that you are not lost in your folder. You can download an example of a time signal here to check that your folder has the same structure.

Alternatively, you can download time signals here. These are the ones we will use for this tutorial.


Now that you have your folder containing your time signals, we invite you to go to the Media Library of your Radio Manager and follow these steps:

1) Go to Radio Identification and click on Add tracks
2) Select all Time signal files, from midnight to 11pm (cmd+A on Mac or CTRL+A on Windows) then click Open
3) Once imported, click on New Playlist, rename the playlist Time Signals, give it a color, leave it in manual and click on Save

list-hourbreak

4) Once you have created your playlist, head over to the Radio Identification tray > Select your 24 files > click on Add to a playlist and select your manual Time Signal playlist.
5) Return to the Time Signal Playlist and rearrange your files by putting the midnight time signal first and 11pm last as shown below.

add-signals-playlist

 

SCHEDULE AN HOURLY BREAK

Now that you've prepared your playlist containing your time signal files in order, you'll be able to schedule it so that every hour the time is announced on your radio station!

To do so:

  1. Head over to Scheduling > Breaks in your Radio Manager
  2. Click on Add a break in the top left corner, a window will open. Here you will discover various options to set up your breaks.
  • Break hour: set this to midnight, as our first time signal will start at this time
  • Priority: set this to 10 (in case you schedule other breaks at the same time)
  • Can stop music: here, if you want the hourly time signal to turn off the music to announce the time, you can enable this option with a tolerance of 0. However, if you want to wait until the end of the music to announce the time, you can leave this option disabled.

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  • Playlist: as we have created our Time Signals playlist
  • Number of tracks: 1 (as we want 1 track per hour)
  • Into Playlist: Hour Break
  • Sequential: so that they broadcast in order, from midnight to 11PM
  • We invite you to set an ending date that corresponds to 6 months after the day you program your time signals (taking into account that you can plan your content up to 6 months in advance)
  • Select all the days of the week.
  • Enable the Repeat every 60 minutes option until 11pm (since this is the last hour of the day).

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At the end of planning your time signals, you should see this:

Capture d’écran 2023-12-15 à 12.00.37.png

Careful: Now that you have planned your time signal, you need to tell the Radio Manager that the change should be taken into account when broadcasting. To do this, go to the Daily Generation tab and click on Regenerate Day. A regeneration requires you to restart the radio, so please do this when you have the fewest listeners.

Here is what should be displayed in your Daily Generation tab, and your hourly time signal should be played on time if you have enabled the Can interrupt music option.

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