Once you have created the Day-Templates in your program, all you need to do is integrating them into a month calendar for broadcasting.

Click the “Planning” tab to display the calendar. You can program up to 30 days in advance.

1. Month navigator: Displays the months you can provide a planning for

2. Month calendar: Displays details for the current month

3. Day-Templates Navigator: Displays the available Day-Templates to make your planning.

4. Planning buttons: Allowing you to generate your planning and to send it to our servers.

To make your Radio planning, you have to drop the Day-Template you want to use on the corresponding date case for which you want to plan the program.

One Day-Template can cover several days simply if you drag the borders of your icon until it stretches to the end of the period you want to cover.

Once you’re happy about the program in your broadcast calendar, click “Generate Planning”.

The action makes Radio Manager gather all the information you have entered in Boxes, Clocks, Podcasts, Playlists, Campaigns and Day-Templates. And it’s all gathered in a coherent program. Before you trigger planning generation, check if your Day-Templates are complete.

Planning generation will fail in case information necessary for the planning is missing. In that case an error message will be displayed containing the changes you have to bring to generate your planning correctly.

Your computer will now calculate the program for the selected days. Once this is finished you will be told so in a message and the boxes for the generated days will turn blue or yellow (refer to the color legend left below the month navigator )

Remark: While generating, at the bottom left of the Radio Manager, a message will be displayed on the status “Generating Planning”, “Has Been Generated”,…

How does the planning generator work ?

The random generator has only one rule when all other restrictions have been set to minimum : not to play a track for the second time before all the tracks in the box have been aired.

When adding restrictions, you’re influencing the generator when it’s picking tracks from boxes like you told it to in your Clocks. It’s randomly selecting tracks, but it removes tracks that have already been played or tracks that are not allowed to play because of the restrictions.

Example: My “Pop” box has a 3 h restriction on Michael Jackson and 2 hours after the track “Billy Jean” by Michael Jackson has played, the time has come for our generator to grab a track from our “Pop” box. All tracks by Michael Jackson will be removed from the available list to grab from, since the restriction was set to 3h.

So the more restrictions you set, the more you reduce the engine’s choice and the bigger your chances will become that the generator picks exactly the same tracks.

(Full box) – (Titles that have already been played during the day) – (tracks removed by restrictions) = (what remains available for the planning generator to select from)

Setting the restrictions to 1440 minutes or 24h, you would take away almost all of the options for the generator. It wouldn’t find a single track in the boxes it can play. In that case it will set the counter to zero again when it’s about tracks that have already been played during the day. But it will still respect the restrictions, This explains why certain radio stations play the same tracks every day. Restrictions are too high, the generator tumbles onto a box with almost no tracks available and so it resets the counter for the box. In case you don’t have may artists in a box, this can happen several times in one day.

So to have more music variety decrease your repetition restrictions. Next fill your boxes with various artists and tracks and check wether certain artists aren’t getting too much exposure in some of your boxes at once. Like that you can avoid the restrictions to work hard on the available amount of titles when the generator is hunting for a nice track.

Visualizing and editing the planning after it has been generated

Visualizing the planning

Next you can verify the planning, It’s the playlist for the entire day created by the Radio Manage respecting the Day-Template. To view it click on the generated day (blue or yellow) for which you want to check the list.

This brings you directly into the planning editor: * The upper part displays all the tracks, jingles , announcements and promo clips in your

programmed day, with a start time for every element, the type of element, the artist, the title,

the duration, the box it belongs to, and the Clock the element fits in. * The lower part sums up all of the podcast sequences that are planned for the day * In the right column of the planning editor you will see a series of buttons (hover the button to

learn more about its function) – Edit Planning : click it to modify your planning – Save Planning to CSV File : the saved file can be used in a program like Excel or Numbers – Print planning – Show Clock Starts : this will give the tracks at the start of a Clock a grey border – See consecutive jingles

To navigate through the day’s planning easily, use the scrollbar at the right of the window to visualize your planning. By default, the elements are presented chronologically. But you can also watch the elements by type, artist or title, clicking the column title for the corresponding view filter.

Modifying your planning

In case you want to modify your planning, you can. You can add, remove or replace any element that ‘s in your planning.

To edit your planning, click “Edit Planning”. You will now see 4 new buttons appear : – Add an element to Planning – Remove selected element from planning – Replace selected element

- Undo previous change (clickable after modifying something)

Remark: adding, removing or replacing is also possible when you right-click a planning element that you want to modify.

> Adding an element: Select the spot in your planning where you want to add an element an click “Add An Element”. A window will appear allowing you to add Music, a Jingle, a Campaign or an Announcement . Then select the Box where the element sits that you want to add. The content list for the box appears below, so select the element and enter.

> Removing an element: Select it in the planning editor and click “Remove Selected Element from planning”. Or right-click “Remove”.

> Replacing an element: Select the element, click “Replace selected planning element” or right-click “Replace” and proceed like when you would add an element (select element type, box, element, enter)

Attention : modifications can affect the flow of your titles in the Clocks that you have programmed later during the day. For example if your replace a title in a clock by a shorter title, the clock could become incomplete since it won’t cover the duration it was supposed to cover in the Day- Template.

!!Incomplete Clocks will be marked in pale rose (see color legend in planning editor)

> Validating changes: To validate the changes, click the “Save Changes” button. !! The button greys out in case you have incomplete Clocks. Check if the timespan you provided for a Clock has been completely covered by the Clock.

Remark : it’s possible that yellow or orange strips appear on certain parts of your planning list. They indicate the errors in the planning .

A planning generated with errors that is sent to our servers will broadcast your program, but it won’t do so according to the exact settings you entered in your Radio Manager.

Sending your Planning / Activating your Radio

The last episode is all about sending your planning to our servers. Simply click the “Send Planning” button.

In case you do so for the first time, this is where you activate your radio, > To activate your radio just send a planning for this day and the next couple of days

Important: in case our serves haven’t received a planning for your radio, they will play random music from your Music Library.

> If you want to make changes to your current planning, make the changes and resend your planning. They will be active within approximately 20 minutes.

> You can send up to 30 days of planning.

A campaign is a recurrent audio message, that can be scheduled for a precise timespan only, A typical campaign would be an auto-promotion campaign, an event campaign, an invitation to visit a website our any other type of campaign (like the name is telling us).

Creating a Campaigns box

And again campaigns live in… Boxes ! To create a campaigns box, follow the same stapes like for Announcements.

Importing and programming a campaign on your Radio

Like with Podcasts, campaigns are managed independently from the music flow. They are inserted in the program at specific times. The way your campaign is inserted is defined in the Import/Edit field.

When selecting “Add A Personal Element” in your Campaigns box, you will see the campaigns import window.

> Locate the file on your hard disk , Select “Browse”. > Enter the name and optional information

> Then define the programming parameters in time, for your campaign * campaign launch : the campaign clip is not aired before this date

* campaign end : the campaign clip is not aired after this date

* tick the “unlimited” box to avoid any time limitation on your clip

* Start and End : these 2 parameters are defining the timespan during day or night when your campaign is going to be aired. For a permanent use of the campaign, set the start to 0h00 and the end to 23h59.

* the campaign clip’s frequency. The default is set to 60 minutes.

Uploading and programming a promo clip are done in one move. But of course you can come back here and change the parameters later. Select Campaign in the appropriate box, right-click the Campaign and select “Edit”.

Remark : You can also program a promo clip on your Radio inserting it into a playlist exactly the way you would insert an Announcement.