SETUP - IMPORTING AND PREPPING AUDIO FILES
Marking Ramp Attributes
When TuneTracker Command Center™ is installed, it sets your computer's audio files to be able to make use of two new file attributes called "tunetracker:onramp" and "tunetracker:offramp." These new attributes give your system the ability to play voice tracks over the intros and the endings of songs, just the way a DJ would "talk the ramps" during a live show.
In order to use the feature, you have to give TuneTracker information about how much of each of the songs can safely be overlapped with a DJ voice-track. You do that by marking the ramp times of each song.
Marking ramps can be a big project, especially if your station has an extra large library. You can minimize the amount of effort required by only marking the ramps of songs that will actually played before or after your voice-tracks. For example, it might be that your format requires you to overlap your announcer's voice-tracks at only two positions in each half hour, and always leading into a song with the Tempo "Fast" and the Genre "Rock." If that's the case, the only songs you need to mark ramp times for, at least initially, are those with the Tempo "Fast" and the Genre "Rock."With your Onramps and Offramps marked, what remains is to add "# VT" (voice-track) lines to your logs, and TuneTracker™ will take care of the rest!
- Open one of your music folders (one containing song files)
- Click the Attributes pulldown menu at the top of the folder window, and from the MP3 Audio File subsection, click on tunetracker:onramp. Do the same for tunetracker:offramp. The two new attribute columns can now be found in the folder headings by scrolling the window all the way to the right.
- The columns may only initially look like a couple extra splits in the column headings. Grab the splits with your left mouse button and drag them wider so you can see what they are.
- Listen to the start and end of each song. You can do so in BeOS Media Player or SoundPlay, or another audio player such as CL-AMP. If you're live on the air with your station already, you'll need to listen to copies of the songs on another computer, or if you're broadcasting over the Internet, you can go into your BeOS media preferences, mute SoundPlay's output to the speakers, and listen off-air with an audio player other than SoundPlay.
- Using a stopwatch or other clock, time the ramps and mark the available ramp times in the appropriate columns. Normally it sounds good if you let set the Onramp (song intro) time to equal the number of seconds prior to the start of the singing...or if it's an entirely instrumental song, set the ramp time to correspond to the place in the song where the main melody begins. The OffRamp time is normally the last five to ten seconds of music as it does its normal fade-out. Since TuneTracker™ does not turn the song's volume down before playing a voice-track over the ending of a song, be certain the song is well on its way to fading down naturally when calculating the available offramp time. If a song starts cold (no available Onramp time because singing starts immediately) or ends cold (with an abrupt "stinger" ending that allows for no overlapping) then do not enter a ramp time.
- To mark the ramp times on the songs, simply click on the hyphen corresponding to the song's OnRamp and OffRamp and type in the length, in seconds. If the ramp time exceeds one minute, for example 1:12, express it as 72 seconds. TuneTracker ramp times are accurate to within a hundredth of a second, so if you wanted to add a quarter-second to the previous example, you could express it as 72.25.
- If you accidentally enter a 0 as a ramp value (never necessary to do...TuneTracker will not overlap if no ramp time has been specified), BeOS will display an odd-looking formula rather than just a zero. You can disregard that. It's not manually alterable back to a zero, but that's what it represents.
Table of Contents