Segments

A segment is a stretch of your broadcast day that you've marked off as something worth saving on its own — your morning show, a sponsored block, a guest interview, a particular hour, a remote. DayTracker can pull each marked segment out of the day's recording as its own MP3 file, either automatically overnight or whenever you press a key.

The marks come from your AutoCast program log. You add two simple lines in the log — one where the segment starts, one where it ends — and AutoCast tells DayTracker when it plays through them. DayTracker takes care of the rest.

Why You'd Use This

A few situations where Segments saves you time:

• Morning show audition copies. Wrap your morning show with two marker lines and every weekday the show pops out as a clean MP3 by the next morning. No scrubbing the timeline, no copy-paste of selections.
• Sponsored block proof-of-performance. Mark the start and end of a sponsor's hour. DayTracker saves it. You can send the file to the sponsor without any extra work.
• Guest interviews. When a guest comes on the air, the operator drops a marker. When they leave, drop another. The full conversation lands in your Markers folder, ready to share or archive.
• Live remotes or events. Same idea. Two lines in the log around the broadcast, and DayTracker hands you a clean file when the day ends.

Marking a Segment in AutoCast

In your daily program log, put a line that says # Marker On at the moment you want the segment to start, and a line that says # Marker Off at the moment you want it to end. Like this:

07:00:00  Music_HitFM_Hour
07:00:00  # Marker On morning_show
08:55:00  # Marker Off
08:55:00  Music_HitFM_Hour

The text after # Marker On (here, morning_show) becomes a label for that segment. It shows up in the filename later and on DayTracker's timeline when you hover the marker. Labels are optional — a bare # Marker On works fine, just unlabeled.

You can mark as many segments as you want in a day. Each # Marker On pairs with the next # Marker Off after it.

What You See on DayTracker's Timeline

When AutoCast plays past a # Marker On, a small gray right-pointing triangle appears in DayTracker's Segments lane (the top lane on the timeline). When AutoCast plays past the matching # Marker Off, a gray left-pointing triangle appears, and the time between the two is tinted slightly darker so the segment reads at a glance.

Hours are shown on the timeline ruler at the bottom — every full-hour tick is colored maroon so you can find 9:00 or 15:00 at a glance without needing a separate lane.

Saving Segments to Disk

There are two ways to get your segments out as audio files.

The automatic way — overnight

Open Settings (the gear icon) and tick Excerpt out daily segments file at midnight. Pick how you want the audio organized:

• Combined — every segment for the day is stitched together end-to-end into a single MP3. Named DayTracker_2026-05-18_markers.mp3 for the 2026-05-18 day.
• Separate files — one MP3 per segment, named with the start time, like DayTracker_2026-05-18_07-00-00.mp3 for a segment that began at 7 a.m.

That's it. Every night at midnight DayTracker writes the day's segments to a Markers folder right next to the day's recording. There's also a plain text file (...markers.txt) listing every segment's start time, end time, length, and label, in case you want to scan the day at a glance.

The on-demand way — press M

If you don't want to wait until midnight — say you want a recording of the morning show right after it ends — press M anywhere in DayTracker. A small dialog asks Combined, Separate, or Cancel. Choose how you want the files organized and DayTracker writes them out the same way the overnight job would, using everything that's been marked so far today.

The dialog's default matches whatever you picked in Settings, but you can override it just for this save without changing your default.

A Few Practical Notes

If you forget to close a segment

If a # Marker On goes by during the day but no # Marker Off follows it before midnight, DayTracker quietly closes the segment for you at 11:59:59 PM. You'll see a brief note about it in the status bar at midnight. The segment still gets saved out cleanly the next morning — just running to the end of the day instead of wherever you'd intended.

If AutoCast restarts during the day

AutoCast walks through the day's program log when it starts up, so any marker lines that were supposed to fire earlier will fire all at once at startup. DayTracker shows them on the timeline so you can see what happened, but it doesn't try to save them out as audio files — there's no recorded audio between them to extract, since AutoCast was off the air at the time.

Overlapping segments

Each # Marker On pairs with the very next # Marker Off. So if you nest brackets like On → On → Off → Off, only the inner pair is captured cleanly. Keep your marker lines in straightforward On-then-Off order in the program log.

Where the Files Land

Everything goes in a folder called Markers next to your day's audio file. On a default install that's ~/Station/Logs/Audio/Markers/. The files there are normal MP3s you can play, share, archive, or drop into another tool — DayTracker writes them at the same fidelity as the day's recording, with no re-encoding.

A Word on Timing

The marker lands at the exact instant AutoCast crosses the directive line in your program log. That's the same moment AutoCast advances from one item to the next. If your # Marker Off sits right at the transition between a commercial and the next item, the cut will fall right at that transition — wherever AutoCast actually moved on, which is usually a touch before the previous audio's literal tail because of EOM and cue points. That's normal: it's the same handoff point a listener hears.