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Keeping AutoCast Running

Radio stations don't take nights and weekends off, and neither does AutoCast. This chapter covers Infinite Walkaway™ — the TuneTracker Systems name for AutoCast's ability to keep your station on the air when no one is around to intervene, for as long as that needs to be.

Infinite Walkaway™

Infinite Walkaway is how AutoCast runs unattended for long stretches — days, weeks, even longer — without a human at the station. Two capabilities working together make it possible: stay-alive features that detect and recover from problems automatically, and automatic program log generation that ensures AutoCast always has fresh content ahead of it.

On the stay-alive side, AutoCast watches itself. A silence sensor listens to the output. An internal watchdog monitors the playback engine. If audio hardware hiccups, AutoCast rebuilds the engine and keeps going. If the Mac reboots from a power interrupt or a system update, AutoCast relaunches itself, resumes from the right place in the log, and sends you an email so you know it happened. Each of these systems is documented in the sections that follow.

On the log side, AutoCast and ClockWork work together so you don't run out of programming. With Infinite Walkaway turned on, AutoCast generates additional days of program logs in advance — a rolling horizon of fresh logs extending into the future. Your music rotation keeps rotating, your format clocks keep firing, and the station has a bottomless well of programming even if the person who normally generates logs is away for longer than expected. Configure how many days ahead to generate in Settings → System.

The combination matters: stay-alive features without fresh logs would eventually mean a station that's "alive" but has nothing left to play; fresh logs without stay-alive features would mean content exists but can't make it to air when something goes wrong. Together, they make AutoCast uniquely suited to stations with small staffs that legitimately need the automation to run itself for extended periods.

The Silence Sensor

The Silence Sensor is AutoCast's first line of defense. It monitors the audio level on your main program output continuously. If the level drops below the configured threshold (-40 dBFS by default) and stays there for longer than the configured duration (10 seconds by default), the sensor fires.

When it fires, AutoCast:

  • Logs a [SILENCE] entry in the Report Log with a timestamp
  • Posts a warning in the Message Pad
  • Sends a Silence Sensor alert email (if alerts are configured)
  • Triggers a recovery action

The recovery action depends on what's happening: if AutoCast can identify a recoverable situation (a missing file, a stalled queue), it attempts to resume. If automation has stopped, it attempts to restart it.

Configure the Silence Sensor in Settings → Silence Sensor. You can also temporarily disable it from within a program log using # SS Off and re-enable it with # SS On — useful for scheduled silent periods where you don't want false alarms.

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If your programming legitimately includes very quiet passages — soft instrumentals, quiet spoken word — you may need to lower the silence threshold (more negative dBFS) to avoid false triggers. A threshold of -55 or -60 dBFS gives you more headroom while still catching real silence.

The Internal Watchdog

Behind the scenes, AutoCast runs an internal watchdog that monitors the playback engine independently of the Silence Sensor. The watchdog tracks when audio was last playing and checks in at regular intervals. If it detects that the engine has stopped responding — even if the Silence Sensor hasn't fired yet — it escalates through a three-stage recovery process:

Stage 1 — Nudge (after about 5 minutes of no audio). AutoCast sends a gentle "advance to the next event" signal to the automation engine, encouraging it to resume on its own. Many transient problems resolve at this stage. An alert email goes out so you know recovery began.

Stage 2 — Engine Rebuild (after about 7 minutes). If the nudge doesn't work, AutoCast tears down and rebuilds the audio engine from scratch, then re-cues the next event. This is more aggressive but handles situations where the engine has reached an unrecoverable state internally — usually after an audio device hiccup or a USB renegotiation.

Stage 3 — Emergency Self-Restart (after about 10 minutes). If the engine rebuild also fails, AutoCast launches a fresh copy of itself and quits the stuck instance. The new instance performs an Exact Time Start, picks up the program log at the correct position, and resumes broadcast — all without anyone touching the keyboard. A second alert email reports the restart.

The watchdog operates silently. Under normal conditions, you'll never know it's there. You'll only see evidence of it in the Report Log and in your alert inbox if something unusual happened overnight.

Reboot Recovery

Power failures happen. Mac updates restart machines unexpectedly. If your automation computer reboots while AutoCast is running, Reboot Recovery gets you back on the air automatically — without anyone at the station.

When Reboot Recovery is enabled (in Settings → System), AutoCast periodically saves its current position in the program log. When AutoCast restarts after an unexpected shutdown, it detects the prior session's saved state, resumes from the correct position in the log, and posts a notification in the Message Pad and an alert email so you know the reboot happened.

For Reboot Recovery to work fully, macOS must be configured for automatic login. Without auto-login, the Mac will sit at the login screen after a reboot and AutoCast won't launch until someone physically logs in. AutoCast reminds you if auto-login isn't set up — you'll see a warning at startup. Don't ignore it.

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Set AutoCast as a Login Item in macOS System Settings → General → Login Items so it launches automatically whenever the Mac logs in. Combined with auto-login, this means a rebooted Mac will have AutoCast back up and running within a minute, automatically.

Consecutive Failure Protection

If AutoCast encounters too many consecutive audio files that fail to play — because they're missing, corrupted, or on an unreachable network drive — it stops trying and posts a diagnostic message rather than spinning endlessly. The message tells you what it found:

  • If the paths are on a network volume (/Volumes/...), the message suggests checking your network share connection
  • For local paths, it suggests checking the drive

This protection prevents AutoCast from silently skipping hundreds of items looking for one that works. Better to stop and tell you what's wrong than to skip your entire music library.

The Report Log

AutoCast maintains a Report Log at Logs/Report Logs/ in your Station Folder. It's a plain text file named by date (ReportLog_MMDDYY.txt) that records significant events — engine activity, silence sensor triggers, watchdog events, recovery actions, missing files, and other diagnostic information.

The Report Log is your historical record of what AutoCast did and why. If something went wrong overnight and you want to understand exactly what happened, start here. It's written in plain language, timestamped, and human-readable — you don't need any special tools to open it.

The Output Log

Separate from the Report Log, the Output Log records what actually aired — every audio item that played, with the time it started. It lives at Logs/Output Logs/ and is available directly from AutoCast by pressing O on the keyboard or right-clicking the Message Pad.

The Output Log is your proof of performance. For commercial stations, it documents spot airplay for affidavits. For any station, it's a clean record of what went to air — useful for music royalty reporting, programming review, or just satisfying your curiosity about what played at 4am.

The Weather Diagnostic Log

AutoCast also maintains a separate weather_log.txt in Misc/System/. It records the weather system's activity — geocoding results, NWS station discovery, data fetches, fallbacks to backup weather sources, and any errors. If the WeatherPad is showing stale or incorrect data, this log tells you exactly where the weather pipeline broke down.

The weather log is kept to a maximum of 200 lines, trimmed automatically. It's human-readable and doesn't require any special tools to open.

Alert Emails — Your Remote Eyes

For unattended overnight operation, alert emails are your best friend. When configured in Settings → Alerts, AutoCast sends an email through your Mac's Mail.app when significant problems occur. A 10-minute cooldown per alert category prevents your inbox from being flooded.

Consider routing alerts to an address that sends you a text message — many mobile carriers offer email-to-SMS gateways, and getting a text at 3am about a silence event is far preferable to discovering it at 6am during the morning show.

Always send a test alert after configuring this feature. The test button in Settings → Alerts is there for exactly this reason.

Best Practices for Unattended Operation

A few habits that make a real difference for overnight reliability:

  • Enable Reboot Recovery. Always.
  • Set up auto-login on the automation Mac.
  • Make AutoCast a Login Item so it restarts automatically after a reboot.
  • Configure alert emails and test them before you rely on them.
  • Keep program logs generated ahead of time — AutoCast should always have tomorrow's log in the folder before midnight. ClockWork can automate this.
  • Don't run other heavy applications on the automation Mac. Let it focus on its job.
  • Check the Report Log periodically — not just when something goes wrong. Seeing the normal pattern makes problems easier to spot.

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