Settings Screen Overview

3. Settings Screen Overview

The Settings Screen in NextKast OnAir allows you to configure a wide range of options to customize your radio station’s operation, audio processing, scheduling, and overall system behavior. This section provides a breakdown of the different settings available and how to use them effectively.

Accessing the Settings Screen

To access the Settings Screen, click the Settings button located at the top left of the NextKast OnAir interface. This will open a window with multiple tabs, each representing a different category of settings.

1. Crossfade Settings

• Crossfade Time: Sets the duration for crossfades between tracks in Automated mode. Different crossfade times can be configured for each category (Music, Commercials, Imaging).
• Fade Only Mode: To change crossfades to use the Auto Trim next start function, double-click on the crossfade time label. This will prevent the crossfade from moving back into the previous track.

2. Auto Trim Settings

• Auto Trim Function: Automatically trims the start or end of a track when the audio level drops to a specified threshold. This can be configured separately for each category (Music, Commercials, Imaging).

3. Artist Separation

• Artist Separation\Title Seperation: Enforces a separation time between tracks by the same artist, measured in hours and fractions of hours. Artist separation is not applied to Commercials and Imaging categories. The system can check for multiple artists using separators like ‘feat’ in the metadata tags.

4. Audience Pleaser

• Audience Pleaser (Streaming Only): When enabled, this feature will select songs with lower audience tune-out levels based on data from your streaming provider. The default setting is off.

5. Rotation and Scheduling Options

• Auto Start Rotation: Automatically starts the scheduled rotation or playlist as soon as NextKast starts up.
• Next Button Switches to Automated Mode: When enabled, pressing the “Next” button will switch from manual to automated mode.
• Tempo Adjust Enabled: Allows the tempo of tracks to be adjusted to fit the hour, providing more precise timing and flow control.
• Automatically Generate Playlist for Day Count: Configures NextKast to generate playlists automatically for a specified number of days, ensuring continuous play without manual intervention.
• Enable iPass: A multi-pass song scheduler that ensures categories with higher priority (e.g., power categories) follow strict artist separation rules. This feature must be enabled in the settings to activate.
• Day Segment Separation: Divides the day into segments (e.g., morning, afternoon, evening) to ensure that songs are evenly distributed across different time slots.
• Web Request: Enables handling of song requests from the web, allowing listeners to make song requests that are then queued for playback.
• Automated Voice: Allows the integration of automated voice announcements using Windows built in text-to-speech.
• Keyboard / BT serial/ Axia Trigger Window: Configures external triggers (such as hardware buttons or footswitches) to control various functions in NextKast, like starting/stopping tracks, triggering ads, or switching modes.

6. Logging and History Management

• Reset Play Times: Clears all stored last-played history and resets song order to the default.
• View App Log: Displays a log of program start and stop dates and times.
• View Played Log: Shows a detailed log of songs played and their times. A separate log for commercials is kept in the NextKast directory names commercialsPlayed.log.

7. Library and Remote Drive Settings

• Set Remote Drive: Allows you to configure your music library to be stored on a different drive or network location. This is useful for stations with large libraries that should not reside on the default C drive or when using cloud or network shared setups.

8. Sweeper/Talent Profile

• Sweeper/Talent Profile: Configure sweeper profiles and voice track job settings to optimize transitions and talent management. This window also contains permission settings for each host, as well as a link to schedule host. A trigger profile can also be set here to schedule when different trigger behavious/profiles are active, trigger profiles can also be set via the startSerialListen playlist macro, more detials can be found in the playlist macro section of this help document.