Settings Reference

The Settings window is where AutoCast learns about your station — your audio hardware, your ZIP code, how you want crossfades to sound, when to send alerts, and much more. Open it from the Settings button in the main interface or with ⌘,.

Settings are organized into tabs. Make your changes, then click Save at the bottom of the window for them to take effect. The Reset Defaults button restores every field to factory values without saving — handy if you've made a mess of the settings and want to start over.

AutoCast stores all settings in a file at Misc/System/Settings/AutoCast.json in your Station Folder. This means your settings travel with your Station Folder — back it up, and your settings are backed up too.

System Tab

Setting	What It Does
Station Folder Path	Displays the current Station Folder location. Click Change… to move it. Changing this setting affects all TuneTracker apps immediately — they all share this path.
Primary Output Device	The main audio output — whatever connects to your station's audio chain and goes to air. Select from all macOS audio output devices detected on your system.
Preview Output Device	A separate output for auditioning music and watching AutoVision videos without putting anything on air. Typically headphones or a monitor speaker. If you only have one audio output, you can leave this blank — preview features just won't be available separately.
Primary Input Device	The live microphone or board input used for live breaks. Select from all macOS audio input devices on your system.
Master Volume Boost	A global output trim in dB applied to all program audio. Default is 0.0 dB (no change). Use this to compensate if your audio chain is consistently too quiet or too loud at AutoCast's normal output level.
Reboot Recovery	When enabled, AutoCast attempts to resume playback from where it left off after an unexpected shutdown or reboot. Highly recommended for unattended operation. AutoCast saves its position periodically and uses that saved position to restart.
Movie Credits Mode	When enabled, the program log scrolls continuously upward — like film credits — rather than jumping to the current item. Some operators find continuous scrolling easier to read; others prefer the jump. Personal preference.
Show Skipped Events	When enabled, items that were skipped by a Time-Correct or Interrupt command remain visible in the program log, shown dimmed. When disabled, skipped items are removed from the display. Useful for seeing what the timing adjustments are doing.
Auto-Login Warning	Warns you at startup if macOS isn't configured for automatic login — which is required for unattended overnight operation. Leave this on unless you've consciously decided not to use auto-login.

Audio Tab

The Audio tab is organized into four sub-tabs, selected along the top of the tab: Devices, Silence Sensor, Loudness, and Plugin Chain. This grouping keeps everything audio-related in one place instead of spread across a crowded row of top-level tabs.

Devices

Audio device selection lives here too — see Primary Output Device, Preview Output Device, and Primary Input Device under System Tab above for what each does. The rest of this sub-tab controls the timing of audio transitions. All values are in seconds unless noted. Getting these right is what makes the difference between transitions that sound natural and ones that feel awkward.

Setting	Default	What It Controls
Universal Overlap	1.0 sec	How early the next song's cue point fires relative to the current song's EOM point, when no specific EOM has been set. Songs without EOM points in the library use this as the crossfade trigger. Increase for tighter transitions; decrease for more breathing room between songs.
EOM Fade Duration	3.0 sec	The crossfade length at EOM transitions. The outgoing song fades out over this duration while the incoming song fades in. 3 seconds is a natural-sounding crossfade for most music styles.
Default Interrupt Fade	5.0 sec	How long it takes to fade out currently playing audio when a # Interrupt command fires. Individual Interrupt commands can override this with their own fade duration.
Live Input Fade Out	1.5 sec	How quickly the live input fades out when a live break ends and automation resumes. A fast fade (0.5–1.0 sec) feels punchy; a slower fade (2–3 sec) feels more gradual.
Overlay Duck Fade	0.3 sec	How quickly the main program audio ducks when an # Overlay command fires. A fast duck (0.1–0.3 sec) is barely noticeable; it's usually the right choice for legal IDs and brief overlays.
Master Volume Boost	0.0 dB	Also accessible here — same as the Master Volume Boost on the System tab.
Use SteadyCast™	On	When enabled, AutoCast plays back the per-song volume adjustments that Librarian's Touchups feature has prepared for your audio files, so songs and announcements reach your listeners at consistent volumes. Songs that haven't been processed by Touchups play at their natural level. See About SteadyCast and Silence Trim below.
Perform Silence Trimming	On	When enabled, AutoCast skips over the silent moments at the beginning and end of audio files that Librarian's Touchups feature has identified, so transitions feel tighter. Files without trim data play in full as usual. See About SteadyCast and Silence Trim below.

Silence Sensor

The Silence Sensor monitors your main program audio output. If it detects sustained silence — a sign something has gone wrong — it triggers a recovery action and sends an alert. For an unmanned station, this is your safety net.

Setting	Default	What It Controls
Enable Silence Sensor	On	Master toggle. Leave this on for unattended operation. Turn it off temporarily if you need to run a silent period intentionally (or use # SS Off in the program log for a more targeted approach).
Duration	10.0 sec	How many consecutive seconds of silence must occur before the sensor fires. 10 seconds catches real problems quickly without being triggered by brief pauses in content. Adjust if your programming includes legitimate silent passages.
Level	-40.0 dBFS	The audio threshold below which audio is considered "silent." -40 dBFS is typical. If your content includes very quiet passages (soft ballads, quiet spoken word), you may need to lower this threshold to avoid false triggers.

Loudness

The Loudness sub-tab is where you fine-tune SteadyCast's behavior. Most stations leave these at their defaults — they're set up to match standard broadcast practice. Adjust only if you have a specific reason to.

Setting	Default	What It Controls
Music Target	−16.0	The target loudness AutoCast aims for when playing files tagged as Music in Librarian's Touchups. Lower values are quieter; higher values are louder. The default matches typical broadcast practice for music.
Voice Target	−14.0	Same idea, but for files tagged as Voice — voicetracks, station IDs, voiced commercials. Voice usually targets a couple of dB louder than music because speech is perceived as quieter than music at the same measured level. The standard gap is 2 dB.
Max Gain Ceiling (dB)	8.0	The maximum amount of boost AutoCast is willing to apply to a very quiet file when bringing it up to target. Higher values let quiet files reach target more aggressively but raise the chance of clipping; lower values are safer but can leave outliers a bit short of target. 8 dB is a safe default for most stations.
Soft Limiter	On	An extra safety net that catches transient peaks at the program output, even when SteadyCast pushes a file's gain up. Recommended on. A change to this setting takes effect the next time AutoCast launches.

Files that haven't been processed by Librarian's Touchups feature ignore these settings entirely and play at their natural level. The Loudness sub-tab only affects files that carry Touchups data.

Plugin Chain

The Plugin Chain sub-tab lets you insert audio processing — compression, limiting, EQ, reverb, and more — directly into AutoCast's program output path, the way a hardware audio processor would sit between your automation and your transmitter or stream encoder. This is available on System 7 Basic and System 7 Pro; System 7 Free shows the sub-tab dimmed with a link to upgrade.

AutoCast uses Apple's Audio Unit (AU) plugin format, the native macOS equivalent of VST. AutoCast ships with a set of Apple's own built-in Audio Units already available — no extra download or purchase required — and any other Audio Unit plugin you've separately installed on your Mac (from Waves, FabFilter, iZotope, Universal Audio, and many others) shows up in the same picker automatically.

Built-in plugins (always available)

Plugin	Use
Compressor	Dynamics control — evens out volume swings within a single piece of audio, tightening up the overall sound.
Peak Limiter	A brickwall ceiling that catches any transient peak before it can clip, no matter what else is happening upstream in the chain.
Parametric EQ	Tone shaping — boost or cut specific frequency ranges to correct a thin, boomy, or harsh-sounding signal.
Matrix Reverb	Adds space and depth. Used sparingly (if at all) on program audio — most stations leave this one unused or reserve it for voicetrack effects.
Delay	Echo/repeat effects. Like reverb, an optional creative tool rather than a standard processing-chain stage.

Using the Plugin Chain

Click Add Plugin… and choose a plugin from the list — it's added to the bottom of the chain. Plugins process audio in the order they're listed, top to bottom, so drag rows to reorder them; each row also has a checkbox to bypass that plugin without removing it, handy for A/B comparing processed and unprocessed sound. Click Edit… on a row to open that plugin's own control panel and adjust its settings — for Apple's built-in plugins this is a simple native panel; third-party plugins open their own GUI. Select Remove to take a plugin out of the chain entirely.

Changes apply live — you'll hear the effect of adding, reordering, or bypassing a plugin immediately on the program output, so you can adjust while listening rather than guessing and checking. The chain and each plugin's settings are saved automatically and survive a relaunch.

A typical station processing chain

If you're not sure where to start, this order matches common practice at small and mid-size stations — each stage catches what the previous one lets through:

1. Compressor — tames overall dynamic range first, so the stages after it have a more consistent signal to work with.
2. Parametric EQ — corrects tonal balance after compression (compression can sometimes change the perceived tone slightly).
3. Peak Limiter — sits last as a final safety net, catching anything the earlier stages missed before it reaches your stream encoder or transmitter.

This is a starting point, not a rule — every station's audio chain, encoder, and source material is a little different. If you already run outboard hardware processing (an Optimod, an Omnia box, or similar) downstream of AutoCast, you may not need much here at all; a Peak Limiter alone as a safety net is a reasonable minimum. Conversely, if AutoCast's output goes straight to your stream encoder with nothing else in between, leaning more on this chain makes more sense.

About SteadyCast and Silence Trim

SteadyCast and Silence Trim are two related conveniences that work as a partnership between Librarian and AutoCast. The work happens in Librarian; the playback effect happens in AutoCast. AutoCast never modifies your audio files — it just plays them more intelligently when Librarian has tagged them with the right information.

SteadyCast — consistent volume from song to song, and announcement to announcement

If you have a music library with a mix of professionally mastered albums, lower-fidelity rips, voicetracks recorded by different DJs in different rooms, and station IDs at all sorts of levels, your listeners hear the bumps every time the volume jumps from one item to the next. SteadyCast smooths those bumps out.

In Librarian's Touchups tab, you select files (or whole folders) and click Apply. Librarian quietly listens to each file and notes how loud it actually is. AutoCast then uses that information at playback to gently turn each file up or down so everything reaches your listeners at a consistent volume — song to song, announcement to announcement, voicetrack to commercial. Your station sounds smoother and more polished, and listeners stop reaching for the volume knob when a quieter track comes on or a hot commercial blasts through.

SteadyCast is recommended for most stations. Once you've processed your library in Librarian, it runs invisibly, requires no ongoing attention, and dramatically improves the listening experience.

Silence Trim — tighter, snappier transitions

Many audio files have a small amount of silence at the very beginning or end — leftover from recording or editing. On a long song this often goes unnoticed, but on voicetracks, sweepers, and short announcements it leaves noticeable dead spots between elements. When you process files with Silence Trim in Librarian, it detects how much silence sits at each end of every file. AutoCast then, at playback, simply starts the audio at the right moment and lets the next event fire as soon as the actual sound has ended.

Where to manage these features

All measurement and per-file configuration happens in Librarian's Touchups tab. Once you've processed your files, the two checkboxes on AutoCast's Audio → Devices sub-tab let you turn either feature on or off globally without re-processing anything in Librarian — handy if you ever want to compare leveled and unleveled output, or temporarily bypass trimming for a specific event.

Voice Track Tab

Setting	Default	What It Controls
Ducking Level	50%	How much the talkbed is reduced in volume while the voice track plays. 50% = half volume. Lower values keep more music presence underneath the DJ; higher values push the music further back.
Talkbed Crossfade	3.0 sec	The fade duration when the talkbed transitions in or out during a voice track sequence.
Fade Up Duration	1.0 sec	How long it takes the music to return to full volume after the voice track ends.
Fade Up Early	0.75 sec	How many seconds before the voice track ends to begin fading the music back up. This creates the natural "music rising under the last words" effect. A little early is almost always better than exactly at the end.
No-Ramp Talkbed Fade	2.0 sec	The fade duration used when a talkbed file has no Ramp point set in the music library. This is the fallback for talkbeds that haven't been fully configured in Librarian.

Weather Tab

Setting	What It Does
ZIP Code	Your station's ZIP code. Used to locate the nearest National Weather Service observation station. Change this to your actual location — the default (54153) is TuneTracker's home ZIP code in Marinette, Wisconsin, which is probably not your station.
Temperature Unit	Fahrenheit or Celsius. Affects both the WeatherPad display and the # TempAnnounce command.

Backgrounds Tab

Setting	What It Does
Time of Day Backgrounds	When enabled, AutoCast automatically changes its background image based on the current season and time of day. Requires appropriately named image files in Misc/System/Wallpaper/TimeofDay/. See Weather & Announcements for filename conventions and how the day is divided into morning, day, afternoon, and night. Works in Light mode.
Weather Condition Backgrounds	When enabled (requires Time of Day Backgrounds to also be enabled), AutoCast uses weather-specific background images during precipitation. When the precipitation stops, it reverts to the standard time-of-day image.

Streaming Tab

See Streaming & Now Playing for full coverage of these settings. In brief:

Setting	What It Does
Feed Audio to SignalCaster	Enables the TCP audio feed to SignalCaster for internet streaming.
Port	TCP port for the SignalCaster connection (default 9170).
Enable Now Playing File	Writes current song metadata to Misc/System/current_song.txt on each new song.
Field 1–4	Which library fields to include in the Now Playing file.
Separator	How fields are separated in the Now Playing file.
Enable UDP Output	Sends the same Now Playing metadata as a UDP packet to an RDS encoder or streaming metadata injector on each new song.
Host/IP, Port	Network address of the receiving device.
Prefix, Suffix, Max Length	Optional formatting to match your specific encoder's expected packet format.

Alerts Tab

AutoCast can send email alerts via your Mac's Mail app when significant problems occur. This is invaluable for unmanned overnight operation — if something goes wrong at 2am, you can get an email on your phone rather than discovering the problem at 6am.

Setting	Default	What It Does
Alerts Enabled	Off	Master toggle for all email alerts.
Email Address	—	Where alert emails are sent. This can be a personal email address, a group address, or a text-to-email address if you want SMS alerts.
Automation Unresponsive	On	Alert when the playback engine stops responding.
Silence Sensor	On	Alert when the silence sensor triggers.
No Program Log	On	Alert when no program log is found for the current hour.
Network Error	On	Alert when a network-dependent feature (weather, streaming) fails.
Reboot Recovery	On	Alert when AutoCast recovers from an unexpected shutdown — so you know the reboot happened and can investigate the cause.

A Send Test button lets you verify that Mail.app integration is working before you rely on it. Always use it after configuring alerts — finding out the alerts don't work during an actual emergency is not ideal.

Switcher Configuration

Settings for the optional Broadcast Tools audio switcher integration. See Hardware Switchers for complete configuration instructions.

Next up: Keeping AutoCast Running →