TUNETRACKER SYSTEM IN ACTION - TuneTracker

What is Live Assist?

In the Broadcast industry, "Live-Assist" programming means using an automation system as a tool in the presentation of a "live" show. Rather than hunting down individual songs on disks or manually selecting audio cuts off the hard drive for playback, the DJ can simply play cuts from a pre-selected list in the automation's program log. Whenever it's time to play a song, the announcer just hits the Start button or the spacebar on the keyboard, to start the song. Taking advantage of the automation's built-in playlist allows him or her to spend more time thinking about what they will say before or after the songs, doing other show preparation, taking phone calls, answering e-mails, chatting with listeners in chatrooms, and doing other tasks (which, at some smaller stations might include mowing the lawn or cleaning the restrooms).

Using the live-assist technique also assures better format consistency, since the program log's list of songs can be carefully selected in TuneStacker™ to provide a perfect mix of styles, tempos, genres, artists, etc. You set the criteria once in your master log, and from then on, TuneStacker™ does all the music selection for you, generating "picture-perfect" music mixes. That way, when it comes time for your show, you can focus on your listeners rather hunting for music.

In a live-assist environment, you can "pop in" as often or as seldom as you like, to do live announcing. It may be that you will turn the automation off during a song (so that the automation comes to a stop once the song is done playing), turn on your Live button, chatter for awhile, then hit the Start button to fire up another song. Once that song has started, you may need a trip to the bathroom or something. Just click the "Auto-On" button, and TuneTracker™ will roll-through as many audio events as you like, until you are ready to "Auto-Off" and go live again. That's the beauty of live-assist.


Taking Requests

While live-assist frees you from music selection, you are by no means limited to only the pre-selected songs that are in the program log. Using TuneTracker Command Center™ and Lightning, you can find and add songs anywhere in the program log with blazing speed. And while you can't manually add songs in TuneTracker Basic™, you can make changes to the log in Lightning and then tell TuneTracker to reload the log afterwards.

Another workaround in TuneTracker Basic™ is to play requested songs by double-clicking them, right where they are stored, in their music folder. This will play them directly in SoundPlay, bypassing TuneTracker, if your system has SoundPlay designated as the default audio player. Two kudos though. We don't recommend dropping songs directly into SoundPlay, because that will chop off the end of the previous song if one is playing. And be sure Auto is turned to "off" in TuneTracker when you manually play songs in SoundPlay.




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