Welcome to Librarian

Librarian is where your station's music lives. It manages your audio library — organizing songs, keeping track of metadata, setting transition points, and making sure AutoCast always has clean, reliable information to work from. Think of it as the quiet professional behind the scenes who has every record filed, labeled, and ready to go.

Your library is stored as a simple tab-separated file (library.tsv) in your Station Folder. Librarian reads it, displays it, lets you filter and edit it, and writes it back to disk. No cloud, no database server, no subscription required — just a well-organized file that every TuneTracker app knows how to read.

The Three Tabs

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Import
Bring audio files and metadata into your library — from files, from other databases, from filenames, or from embedded tags.
🏷️
Attributes
View and edit song metadata — artist, title, genre, year, and any custom fields your station uses.
🎚️
Transitions
Set EOM, Cue, and Ramp points on songs so AutoCast knows exactly when to start and stop each track.

How the Window Works

Librarian's window is divided into three vertical panes that work together:

💡

You can select multiple songs in the middle pane and edit their attributes all at once. Very handy when you've just imported a batch of tracks that share the same genre or year.

The Status Bar

The black bar at the very bottom of the window does double duty. Hover your mouse over any control and it shows a plain-English description of what that control does — no guessing required. When your mouse isn't hovering over anything, it shows the current state of your library: how many entries are loaded, how many are showing after filtering, and so on.

The gold speaker icon on the left flashes green when something finishes successfully, and red when something needs your attention. If it goes red, read the message before doing anything else — it won't bite, but it does have something important to say.

Your Station Folder

Librarian — like all TuneTracker apps — works within a single Station Folder that you set up when you first launched the suite. All your music, your library database, your logs, and your settings live inside that folder. If you've moved things around and the app seems confused, check Preferences to make sure it's still pointing at the right place.

📁

Your library file lives at {StationFolder}/Logs/Database/library.tsv. Librarian keeps five rolling backups automatically, so if something ever goes sideways, your data isn't far away.

Keyboard Shortcuts

ShortcutWhat it does
SpaceToggle playback on the Transitions tab.
EDrop an EOM marker at the current playback position.
CDrop a Cue marker at the current playback position.
RDrop a Ramp marker at the current playback position.
EscapeClear markers and reset the waveform display.
↑ ↓Navigate the song list (stops playback first, so you don't accidentally audition twelve songs at once).
⌘ASelect all songs in the current view.
⌘LApply attribute changes (same as clicking the Apply button).
⌃↩Apply attribute changes — alternate shortcut.

A Typical Workflow

If you're new to Librarian, here's how things usually go:

  1. Import your audio files — Use the Import tab's "See This First" wizard. It walks you through picking files, choosing where they go, and getting them into the library.
  2. Clean up metadata — Head to Attributes to fill in artists, titles, genres, and any other fields your station cares about. The filter system in the middle pane makes it easy to work on groups of songs at once.
  3. Set transition points — Use the Transitions tab to mark where each song's EOM, Cue, and Ramp points are. AutoCast uses these to make your segues sound natural rather than abrupt.
  4. Let AutoCast take it from here — Once your library is in good shape, the rest of the TuneTracker suite can do its job properly. A well-tended library makes everything downstream work better.