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The library

deadair holds no catalogue of its own. It programmes the music your provider already gives you, a Spotify account or a Subsonic server such as Navidrome, and it grants you no rights to broadcast any of it: read the music licensing notes before you publish an address. What it keeps is a library: an entry for every record it has met, and what it has learned about each.

The library: every record the station has taken in, with its state and your rating Fig. 1. The library's tracks.

Where the records come from​

A music provider is a plugin. Two are bundled: Spotify, and Navidrome or any other server that speaks the Subsonic API. The library fills from their playlists, because a playlist is the only list of records a provider will hand over, and the station walks them whenever a provider's settings are saved and again every hour. A Navidrome library with no playlists is still a complete setup: the plugin offers one extra playlist, Everything, which is the whole library.

When a model chooses a record no playlist carries, the station looks it up at your providers, and a strict match on title and lead artist becomes a real entry, marked "found". A near match is refused: it would air the wrong record under the right name.

Spotify needs two authorizations, and you need both. The connection lets the plugin read your library. The playback authorization, on the card below it, lets the station fetch the audio. With only the first, your playlists list perfectly and every record is dropped for want of audio. The card walks you through the second.

What it records about each record​

A record's page shows its title, artist, album, year and duration, and then:

  • Copies: each provider's copy, whether it is on this machine, its format and size. A clean edit and the explicit original are one record with two copies, and the explicit label rides on the copy.
  • Measurement: its cue points and loudness, when they were taken and by what.
  • Airings: when it has played.
  • What the sources say: genres, moods, label, and facts drawn from articles, each with the sentence that supports it. See claims.
  • Your rating: liked, neutral or disliked, which can also be set on the artist and the album. A dislike anywhere wins outright. See the programme.

The tracks list filters by state: On this machine, Not fetched, Unmeasured, Failing and Benched. A zero under the last two is the answer you want.

Measuring each record​

Records rarely start and stop where the file does. A measurement program beside the station decodes each record and answers with four points (where the sound starts, where the intro ends, where the ending begins, where the sound stops) and its loudness to the EBU R128 standard. With them the station trims the silence at head and tail, knows how long a presenter may talk over an intro, sizes each blend from what both records do, and sets every record to one target loudness, so a quiet 1970s pressing and a loud modern master arrive level.

It is a separate program because the station's own server decodes no audio, and it is reached over HTTP, so moving it to a bigger machine is one address in the analyzer plugin's settings. A download that arrived cut short is reported as incomplete rather than measured, because a truncated file measures confidently and wrongly.

An unmeasured record still plays, untrimmed, left to the stream's live leveller. And one rule about blends has no exception: a record is never faded into speech.

Nothing airs until its audio is here​

A record is committed to the running order only once its audio is on this machine. Fetching from a provider at the moment the player needed the record once put two seconds of silence on air, so the station fetches several records ahead. A record whose audio has not arrived is held rather than skipped, so your sequence is never reordered by whichever download finished first. A copy that fails four times in a row is benched, a record with no copy left comes out of the order before its slot, and the hourly walk gives a benched copy another chance if the provider still lists it. See the running order.

Every record fetched is kept, so a second airing costs no download. "Keep at most" under Settings → Playout caps the space; the least recently played go first, and never one about to air.

Playlists and charts​

Two ways to put a whole list on air:

  • A playlist: open it under Library → Playlists and press Air this playlist. The running order is rebuilt from it, in its order, and your dislikes and explicit-content policy still apply.
  • A chart, from a plugin that publishes one, such as Last.fm. Airing it puts the station on those records for a broadcast; when they run out it programmes itself again. Each entry goes through the same lookup and rules as any other pick.

Either can also be what the station plays when nothing is scheduled. See the programme.

In the console​

Library in the rail, or the L key: Tracks, Artists, Playlists, Charts and News. A record's page opens from any list, or from its name typed into Jump to anything. A provider's connection, and Spotify's playback authorization, are on its page under Settings → Plugins. Measurement has its own section in Settings.