Perfect Music Library Management for Internet Radio DJs
February 28, 2017 in digital music by Dan Gravell
Music fans can be fierce, loyal and obsessive about their hard-won music collection. Back in the day, did you order your vinyl or CD collection A-to-Z by artist, album, genre or year of release? These were pretty much the only catalogue options available.
But with the advent of digital music, these basic choices have mushroomed into a huge selection of sorting options… providing your electronic library has accurate and complete metadata. We still have the names, years and genres pinned down, but we can also manage a raft of other contextual traits, including bitrate, abstract and length to name a few.
Spacial is as passionate about music as we are about Internet radio. It hurts when we see tracks with certain phrases in the title like “(Official)” and “(with lyrics)”. This might indicate these tracks were downloaded or converted from sites like YouTube, and will almost certainly have no associated metadata.
A well-catalogued audio collection is one means of running your station like clockwork, but the larger the library, the more time you’ll sink into updating it. Well, that is unless you have a magic wand or an automated system which does so on your behalf...
Get everything in proportion with Spacial
Album art used to be a cultural statement in its own right. Whilst digital streaming has lessened its iconic potential, plenty of listeners still want to see what visuals their tracks are matched to. This isn’t easy, however, when downloaded songs don’t come with a pre-defined art cover, or the covers themselves vary in size and quality throughout your collection.
We’re big fans of Harry Potter but unfortunately, there are no real magic wands. Thankfully, though, SAM Broadcaster Cloud, a best-selling Spacial solution, allows you to search for album covers in Google within the SAM Broadcaster Cloud interface and automatically adds the album cover to the song, making the whole browsing experience more appealing.
All of these covers are matched to the same proportions, falling into uniformity with one another. It’s like having a perfectly arranged line of records, each displaying their own imitable character to whoever you’re showing them off to.
Sort and filter your data
Grouping tracks isn’t always a walk in the park. To get everything in order, you have to focus on the ‘tags’ for your music – basically the metadata embedded in an audio file. It links different pieces under one umbrella, like separately downloaded tracks for a Smiths or Laura Marling album.
The genre, year of release and official song title form most of these essential track features. SAM Broadcaster Cloud automatically adds the tags for you when you add the album cover by doing a Google search within the cloud interface, enabling you to set the parameters for categorisation.
What’s more, Spacial products allow you to filter your library by ‘media’, ‘requests’, ‘duration range’, ‘recently added’ and more, so that you can get a handle on your music collection.
Playlists for radio broadcast software
Of course, there are more advanced considerations waiting for professionals like a broadcaster or radio DJ. Having a smooth, sensible library is a prerequisite for uploading tracks correctly into your corresponding radio stations.
Budding DJs can use Spacial to integrate and sort thousands of music files in the relevant station. ‘Shared playlist’ status means that a Station Manager or radio DJ can play the same track over multiple stations under a shared server. More specific automation, meanwhile, limits certain tracks (like those of a niche genre) to one group.
Spacial also lets you separate songs based on their proximity with Separation Rules, using either time or other criteria – having one Shakira pick, for example, playing no less than an hour after the last. This becomes infinitely easier if you have an organised library to delve into.
Whether you’re a radio DJ or simply a casual listener, these library management tips are sound advice for anyone with a love of music. Spacial is the radio automation software provider of choice, taking your passion to the next level. Combined with solutions like bliss, it’s the nth degree of organisational smarts that you should make use of. Check out Spacial, and follow our pointers for music library bliss...
Thanks to barnimages.com for the image above.
