The Button Pad

The Button Pad is a scrollable grid of action buttons that lives in the lower half of AutoCast's center column. Think of it as your personal control surface — a customizable panel of one-click shortcuts for anything you might need to trigger quickly during a broadcast. Hot audio drops, liner cards, internet streams, hardware switcher commands, show notes — if you do it regularly, there's probably a button type for it.

Every station's Button Pad is different, tailored to how that station operates. A talk station might fill theirs with audio beds and sound effects. A music station might have genre-specific sweeper categories, stream relays, and a row of jingle buttons. The Button Pad adapts to you.

Button Types

AutoCast supports twelve types of buttons, each with a distinct default color and a ghosted icon on the button face so you can tell them apart at a glance:

Creating a New Button

To add a button, click the + tile — the one with the dashed border and a plus sign — at the end of the button grid. The Button Settings window opens.

You can also drag an audio file or text file directly onto the + tile. AutoCast recognizes the file type, pre-selects the appropriate button type (Hot Button for audio, Text Button for text files), and opens the editor with the file path already filled in.

The Button Settings window has two columns:

Left column — a live preview of the button as it will appear, updating in real time as you type. Below the preview: three label lines (you can use one, two, or all three to write the button's name across multiple lines), and a Tags field.

Right column — the button type dropdown and the type-specific configuration area. What appears here changes depending on the button type you select.

Click the orange Save button (or press Return) when you're done. Your new button appears in the grid immediately.

Button Labels and Tags

Each button has up to three lines of label text, displayed on the button face. Keep them short — you're working with a small tile. Two lines of three or four words each usually reads better than cramming everything onto one line.

Tags are keywords you assign to a button for filtering purposes. They don't appear on the button itself — they're just search terms. For example, a button tagged "morning jocks sports weather" will show up when you search for any of those words in the Button Pad search bar. Tags are how you keep a large button collection organized and quickly findable.

Assigning a Keyboard Hotkey

Below the type-specific settings, every button — regardless of type — has an Assign a Hotkey section. This lets you fire a button instantly from the keyboard, which is handy for live-DJ use: sound effects, liners, and other Hot Buttons you want at your fingertips without reaching for the mouse.

Click the hotkey box (it reads "Click to record…" when nothing is assigned), then press Option plus a letter, number, or symbol key — for example, Option-O or Option-1. The box shows what you pressed (opt-o) as soon as you release the keys. Click Clear to remove an assigned hotkey, or Done to stop recording without changing anything (pressing Esc while recording does the same thing).

If the combination you pressed is already assigned to another button, AutoCast tells you which one and doesn't accept the change — hotkeys can't be shared between two buttons. Assign it to the new button first, or clear it from the old one, whichever you'd rather keep.

Hotkeys are local to AutoCast — they only fire while AutoCast is the frontmost application, the same way the Button Pad's color-adjustment shortcuts work. They won't do anything while you're working in another app, and they're ignored while you're typing in a text field anywhere in AutoCast, so there's no risk of accidentally firing a button while filling out a label or a search box.

A few keys can't be assigned: Escape always cancels the recording rather than being recorded itself (the same convention macOS's own keyboard shortcut settings use), and Tab and Return are reserved because of their existing role moving between fields and confirming dialogs.

Editing and Organizing Buttons

To edit an existing button, right-click it and choose Edit, or double-click it. The same Button Settings window opens with all the current values loaded.

Buttons appear in the grid in the order they were created, but you can reorder them. Right-click a button to find the reordering options.

To search and filter your buttons, click the magnifying glass icon at the lower-right corner of the Button Pad panel. A search bar slides out. Start typing — the grid filters in real time to show only buttons whose label text or tags match. Click the × to collapse the search bar and see all buttons again.

Customizing Button Colors

Each button type has a default color, but you can override the colors for any type across all your buttons. Create a file called button_colors.txt in Misc/System/ inside your Station Folder. Each line sets the color for one button type:

// My custom button colors
hotButton:#FF9900
cart:#AADDBB
textButton:#6699CC

Lines starting with // or # are treated as comments. Changes take effect the next time AutoCast reloads the button colors file — which happens automatically whenever it changes on disk.

Adjusting Colors from the Keyboard

You don't have to edit a file to change the look of the Button Pad. AutoCast comes with a collection of pre-configured color schemes, and three keyboard combinations let you change the look on the fly:

Keys	What it does
⌘← / ⌘→	Step to the previous or next color scheme. The Message Pad shows the name of the scheme you land on.
⌘↑ / ⌘↓	Make all the buttons lighter or darker. Each press moves the colors 5% toward white or black. You can lighten them a few steps, or keep darkening all the way to black.
⇧⌘↑ / ⇧⌘↓	Make all the buttons more or less saturated. Each press moves the colors 5% toward vivid color or toward gray — all the way to grayscale if you like.

Brightness and saturation work together and are applied on top of whichever color scheme is showing, so you can start from any scheme and tune it to taste. The Message Pad reports each step (for example, "Button brightness: -3") and tells you when you've reached the limit. Your settings are remembered the next time you launch AutoCast, and moving to a different color scheme starts that scheme fresh, at its normal brightness and saturation.

In Dark mode the Button Pad uses its own fixed palette, so color schemes and these adjustments show in Light mode.

Found a look you love? Press ⇧⌘L (Shift-Command-L) to make it your new default. AutoCast saves the color scheme you're using, along with your current brightness and saturation, as the new baseline, and keeps your previous default as a backup file. From then on, pressing D resets the Button Pad to your look instead of the original. Locking colors works in Light mode.

Button Behaviors in Detail

Hot Button Playback

When you click a Hot Button, AutoCast acquires a player slot, opens the audio file, and starts playing it immediately. The button's volume boost setting (in dB) is applied to that slot's output, letting you compensate for files that are louder or quieter than your normal program level. The playback is logged to the Output Log and Now Playing file.

Hot Buttons support a long-press preview: hold the button for one second instead of clicking it, and the audio plays on your preview output device rather than going to air. The button border blinks orange briefly to confirm preview mode is active.

Cart Rotation

Cart buttons use a rotation tracker to cycle through a category of files. You configure a Cart button with a keyword, and AutoCast searches the music library's Comment field for files containing that keyword. It rotates through all matching files in alphabetical order before repeating any — so your sweeper Cart button plays Sweeper 1, then 2, then 3, then back to 1, ensuring variety.

Input Source

An Input Source button routes a specific audio input device to your main program output and starts an infinite live input session. Only one Input Source button can be active at a time — clicking a second one while another is active shows a "One at a Time" message. To end an Input Source session, use the context menu on the active deck or click the appropriate button again.

Stream Relay

A Stream button starts an internet audio stream relay through AutoCast's player. Only one stream can play at a time. The stream appears on a deck with elapsed time counting up and "∞" for remaining time. To stop it, use the right-click menu on the deck.

AutoVision

AutoCast pre-fetches the AutoVision video catalog 30 seconds after launch and refreshes it hourly, so there's no waiting when you click an AutoVision button. Videos play in the Logo panel at the top of the right column. Audio routes to your preview output — it never goes on air. A progress bar appears at the bottom of the video, and you can click anywhere on the video to pause/resume. Long-press the video to zoom it to double size for easier viewing.

Playlist Button

A Playlist button hands AutoCast a separate, self-contained song list to play straight through, completely independent of your regular program log — handy for a dedicated holiday music block, a sponsor's music set, an after-hours long-form mix, or anything else you want to drop into instantly without touching today's log. Click it, and AutoCast immediately stops whatever's on air, shows a simple "Playlist" placeholder in the first deck position, and starts the first song. Songs flow into one another using the transitions already designated for each song in Librarian, exactly like normal automation.

A ButtonPad playlist is just a simple list of paths and filenames that AutoCast sequences through in order — no commands, no Hour markers, nothing but songs. The easiest way to build one: open ClockWork, click The Editor tab, select the empty "ButtonPad Playlist" entry, and search for and drag songs into it right there on the Editor tab. Once you've built a playlist there, return to AutoCast. Create a new ButtonPad button. Right-click on it and choose Edit Button. Browse to Station/Logs/Program Logs and find your custom-edited playlist. Give the Playlist a name — the name that appears in the deck placeholder while it's playing. Also edit the button's label. If you want to be able to search for the button using a tag, add the tag.

AutoCast always starts a ButtonPad playlist at its very beginning. What happens next depends on AutoCast's Auto button. If Auto is set to off, just one item in the playlist plays, then AutoCast goes silent. Clicking the large gray Start button plays the next item in the playlist, after which it stops again. If Auto is set to on, AutoCast flows continuously through the playlist without stopping. A ButtonPad playlist plays in a loop: if you walk away and leave it playing in Auto mode, it returns to the first playlist item when it finishes the last one.

To end a Playlist session, use the same deck button — it shows as a lit green play button for as long as the playlist is running:

Action	What happens
Quick click	Stops immediately — a hard cut, no fade.
Press and hold, then release	Fades the playlist out over 4 seconds. Releasing at any point ends the session at whatever volume the fade has reached — hold the full 4 seconds for a graceful, silent handoff back to automation.

Either way, AutoCast reloads the regular program log the instant the playlist ends — the same reload Cmd-R performs — and picks back up exactly where it should be for the current time, regardless of how long the playlist was running.

Next up: Music Search & Library →