Currently, at WUMD, use use the showlog area on On-Air to show all the promos for shows after the current show, and for the next five days. There are too many promos for all the shows to fit in one show log, so limiting them to ‘future’ hours seems reasonable.
In the past, I’ve added LOAD SHOWLOG memos into the log, to load a new one every hour. I have a program OUTSL which generates a showlog file for each hour, such as PrmSun15 for Sunday at 3pm. The logs would just load the appropriate one each hour.
A problem arises when AUTO is OFF in OnAir, because it doesn’t see these memos. When a block of live DJs in on the air, the loaded showlog gets behind by several hours, maybe even a whole day.
I solved the problem with OMTASL, the automatic background task showlog loader.It runs on another server on the network, and windows task manager runs it at ten past every hour. It’s similar to OMTSL, but it only generates the showlog for the current day and hour, names it SHOWLOG (or whatever I want), then sends a signal to On-Air to load it. Whammo! The showlog is ‘current’ all day long. Even if a DJ loads a different showlog, the ‘current’ one will replace it at ten past. This is not a problem for DJs at WUMD because our format has breaks every twenty minutes from the top of the hour.
A future planned enhancement is to have a ‘scheduled list’ of prebuilt showlogs with the day and hour it should be automatically loaded. I’m even thinking of just scanning the showlog path, and if a showlog is named for the day and hour, like Sun15, it’ll load that showlog instead of the generated one.