Remote Voice Tracking (Usage)

 

This page explains how to perform remote voice tracking into PlayIt Live via a web browser. You will need:

 

1. The remote access URL of your station

This usually ends with .playitradio.com and must start with https://. If you having trouble connecting, try visiting https://www.playitradio.com and pasting the address into the box and clicking Connect.

 

2. Username

3. Password

4. A Chrome-based web browser such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Vivaldi. These are available on any operating system.

 

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Visit the remote access URL in a web browser.

 

Select Remote Voice Tracking:

 

Enter your Username and Password:

 

Select the voice tracking slot you wish to voice track into:

 

If there are no voice tracking slots available you will see the following message. Your station programmer must ensure there are voice tracking placeholder items in the hours you need to voice track:

 

After selecting a slot, the playout log items in the hour will be downloaded and the browser will begin to download the start and end of the audio for each of the tracks in the hour. The start of the track will be up until 10 seconds + the audition time (see below) after the intro point and the end of the track will be from the audition time before the cue out point of the track. Once the download has finished, the Downloading icon will disappear.

 

On the right hand side, you will see the Session Controls section. Here you can switch to a different hour slot or end the remote session. It is important to end the remote session after you have finished to ensure other users can connect in the future. There is a limit on the number of users who can connect at the same time. The Update Queue shows the commands that are being sent to the server. If these are showing as "Processed" you know these are being accepted successfully by the remote voice tracking server.

 

 

Click the Record icon next to a Voice Tracking placeholder item to launch the segue editor.

 

 

Click the Record button on the Segue Editor to start recording your microphone into the voice track item. If this is the first time you have used voice tracking you will be prompted to allow the browser to access your microphone. You must click Allow.

 

Select the playback device that will be used to play the audio and the microphone device used to record. You should choose a microphone device that does not record the playback and you should wear headphones so the audio from the computer is not picked up by the microphone. Click Save Changes. The voice track will then start recording.

 

 

The end of the previous track will start playing and your microphone will be recorded. Speak at the track is finishing. When you are ready to play the next track click the Next icon: . Finish recording your voice track, then click the Stop icon: . You can also press the R key to start recording, advance to the next track and stop the recording in succession.

 

Depending on the performance of your computer, the browser may need to finish encoding your recorded audio. Once encoding has finished, the interface will be ready to use again.

 

Click anywhere in the timeline to place the playback marker and click the Play button (or spacebar) to start playing the audio to review your recording. If you wish, you can use the Duck other tracks checkbox on the Segue Information section to bring down the audio of the previous and next track. The attenutation settings used here are the ones configured within PlayIt Live.

 

 

You can also manually adjust the volume envelope by clicking on the orange line to create a point and then clicking again on that point to move it. Each point will be shown with a red square. To remove a point, drag the point up or down outside the waveform box.

 

You can change the overall volume of the track by editing the Gain section under Audio Settings. This is useful if your microphone is particularly quiet. In this case you would increase the gain value.

 

 

You can move your voice track recording relative to the previous or next item. To do so, click the title (where it says [Voice Track Placeholder]) and drag it to the desired location. If you move it from the left-hand side of the track, it will move relative to the previous track. If you move it from the right-hand side of the track, it will move relative to the next track. Moving a track is useful if you missed the point where you wanted to finish speaking and wanted to correct it without re-recording.

 

Once you have finished recording and tweaking your voice track segue, click Next Voice to advance to the next voice track item to record. Once you do this the voice track you just recorded along with the segue information will be sent to the voice tracking server ready to broadcast.

 

Once you have finished with the segue editor, click Save at the bottom.

 

You will notice in the main interface that the Update Queue is populated with processed commands:

 

It is worth regularly checking this to ensure the queue is being processed as expected.

 

To add more voice tracks to the hour, drag and drop the Add Voice Track button to where you want to add the voice track. If you click the button the voice track will be added to the end of the hour.

 

You can see a list of the tracks available on the remote voice tracking system that you can drag and drop into the hour. You can also filter by track group or use the search box.

 

Click and drag any item row to move it within the hour.

 

In the segue editor, the Carts feature allows you to record audio from your computer straight into your voice track. This is useful if you want to include a bed (background music) or a station ID (jingle). Carts are located on the right-hand side of the segue editor:

 

To load a track, you can either drag and drop a track from your file system into the player, or you can click the 'three dots' and select Load File...

 

Click the Play button to play the cart while recording a voice track and the cart will be included directly in the recording. Drag the slider on the cart to adjust the volume of the cart if it is too loud to talk over.

 

The audition time is the amount of time the segue editor will play of the end of the previous track before you need to speak. This can be changed under the Settings button on the Segue Editor. If you increase the Audition Time, you will need to click Clear Audio Cache and refresh the browser to download more audio otherwise you will hear silence if not enough audio has been downloaded.

 

Remember to end your remote session by clicking the End Remote Session button so others can connect, if necessary. If there are any pending items in the update queue, it will wait for these to finish before logging you out. Do not close your browser until these have finished otherwise your hour may be incomplete.

 

Happy voice tracking!

 

If you see this message, please contact your station administrator. The server has not been correctly configured for browser-based remote voice tracking.