Hi all,
Found the forum through googling for some advice with Zara and seems a real nice forum 🙂
I am involved as a volunteer with local hospital radio, where they use Zara as a playout system when the studio is unoccupied. Any advice would be greatly appreciated please.
Here's my query:
All the database is merged into one, no seperate folders, the event programming side of things works well and pre recorded shows are scheduled and play fine.
However, when no scheduled events are playing Zara just picks random tracks from the mass database along with some pre-programmed jingles etc.
(Sorry this is a bit long winded)
What I would like to do but can't work how to is make up a playlist (eg 70's 2 hour list)
have it playout as an event, when it has finished continue picking tracks and continuing from the main database so that the music continues, so here's where my problems start:
I made a playlist in Zara and saved it as a 'list file' and programmed it as a scheduled event. It played fine and started when it was supposed to. When it finished playing the list, it did not revert to playing from the database but the music stopped altogether.
Can anyone please advise me where I am going wrong?
Many thanks
Regards
Dale 🙂
Depends on what you would like it to do.
If you want Zara to start the playlist over again, at the top of the Zara page is a drop down box right in the middle. Set it for "Repeat" and the current playlist will start over.
If you want it to start a different playlist, you can include the next playlist file name at the end of the current playlist. Called a "nested" playlist, the last line in the current playlist starts the next playlist and so on.
Or, you could schedule another playlist as an event but you'd need to know how long you want each to play.
My playlists generally consist of many entries of "random" plays. For instance, 10 different artists each in there own file folder. Each folder is entered as a "random" play in the list. Each time the playlist runs, the order of the artists is the same but the tunes in the folder are played at random.
When you have a playlist to play by an event, dont save it as a .lst file as it will replace the playlist in the main window. Save your event playlist as an .seq file. It will then play in a box and when it has finished it will stop and Zara will return to the main list. If you want to play 1 track from a playlist as an event (eg a playlist of station id's or trailers) save the playlist as a.rot file. It will then play one track from the playlist and then go back to the main list. Next time you have an event to play the .rot file it will play the next track down in the .rot file.
Many thanks for your replies,
Have been taken your kind advice and been playing around for the last hour or so and the .seq file seems to be doing exactly what I have been trying to do.
Now time to play with .rot files 🙂
Once again many thanks!
Dale 🙂
No Problem Dale, thats what were here for.
One problem I found (at least with the older versions of Zara) is that while you can put a series of .seq files in a .rot file, Zara doesn't appear to be able to randomly play .seq files in a directory. Has anyone else had that problem, and is it fixed in newer releases?
No its still the same with the new version,cant be done. I thought that was a good idea as well untill I tried it.