If you want to add jingles or advertisements to the flow of your station's program you'll need to manage them via the Breaks Management area.


Keep in mind that The breaks feature is part of the automation tools and, thus, available for all plans except Simulcast.

The owner and all the administrators (Staff) have access to this management area. 


Breaks are in effect small playlists that play on designated times throughout the day. Breaks can be scheduled through their designated management area, so that they are clearly set and organized.


Breaks can only play on specific break slots. In each break slot, you can assign one or more break items.


To get started, go to the management area of your station, click on the Management tab and select Breaks. Here you can see the available break items, check their status (active or inactive), update the break settings as well as create and schedule new break items.






 

Adding a Break 

Click on the 'ADD BREAK' option.

This will open a new pop-up window in order to create the new break.





1.Break Settings


Firstly, you will add:


A title for the break as to be able to distinguish it.


Tags: Although this is optional, a tagging system is helpful if you want to categorise your breaks. For example, breaks that are commercial advertisements, show jingles or Top of the Hour jingles.


Settings of the break item: You can choose to use the default settings or not. 


Status: Select active or inactive from the dropdown menu. 


Priority: In case that you schedule multiple break files to play in one time slot, you can select their priority. For example, you can select that the commercial A will play first, then the show jingle X and at the end a station's promo jingle No1. The lower the number, the higher the priority (0 is the highest priority).


 2. What to play


The second tab of this window shows the available files, the play method and contains the option to upload new files.


Click on "Upload Files" and select which kind of media you will be uploading, then click "Upload". Once you select a file from your computer, it will start uploading.When the upload is complete the jingle or commercial file will appear on the list below. To add it to this break item, click on the '+' symbol next to it (the break file(s) that will play, appear(s) on the right column). The 'play method' setting applies when we have added more than one audio files. You can choose to either have a random choice among the added files to air at the time that the break is scheduled, or all of them in a consecutive order. In this example, since we only uploaded one jingle, there will be no difference made from this setting.


You can select if this is a Jingle or a Commercial Advertisement. This will help you organize the Break list more efficinetly. These categories have nothing to do with Radiojar or change anything on the Billing. Radiojar does NOT profit from your commercials or interfere with the breaks.







3. Schedule in Slots


Now we need to specify when this break item will be scheduled to play, so we select the tab "Schedule in slots".


Select the time period that you want the break to play and the time slots. Here you can see some ready made time slots every hour. You can make changes to this by adding new time slots or deleting others.







Click SAVE and the break is ready to air!


How to edit a break item

You can always edit or delete the break item using the pen or bin icon respectivelly.





Break Schedule

"Break schedule" gives you an overview of the breaks that will actually play each day.







Default Break Settings


Let's take a look at the default break settings. 


The maximum duration of the break limits the total time of the break files that will play on a specific spot. For example, if you don't want the breaks to overcome the limit of 2 minutes, then you will set the maximum duration of the break slot in a total of of minutes.  If the duration is set to "o", there will be no limit on the break air time.


The break interruption tolerance refers to the total time that the break will be paused and not air as to wait for a track to finish. Giving some tolerance time provides a better listening experience, as the playing files will not be suddenly interrupted. In case you want to make sure that, no matter what, the break will play on a specific time, then set the interruption tolerance to 0 minutes (for instance, for a time announcement) and/or tick on the option "Break can interrupt the playing track".