ProppFrexx ONAIR User-Forum

Hi all,

I'm trying to use an overlay to playout some newsitems at the bottom of the hour (local news)
The overlay will fire off a script. The overlay is scheduled as soft start, with 120 sec max delay and it is allowed to start early. Options are : AsPlaylistInsert and it will suspend the running program. So far so good, overlays come up nicely and will fire the script.
The script is set up like this :

1. LoadTrack, newsopener.mp3, SupressAddHistory, SuppressHistoryCheck
2. Random pick from /Newsitems, options used are SuppressACPD, ClearAllCuePoints & ClearAllVolumePoints (as it's only speech, I want to get rid of possible fade in/fade out and next before the end of the item)
3. Like line 1, but with newsseperator.mp3
4. Like line 2
5. Like line 1, but with newsseperator.mp3
6. Like line 2
7. LoadTrack, weatherreport.mp3



The script itself is set to sequential, max history is set to 8 (the amount of available news items in de library at this moment)
Script runs fine, however, most of the time I end up with the same newsitem twice in one 'go'. I.e. news item 1, news item 4 and news item 1 again. It happens with all items, and sometime I even end up with news items next to each other (3, 3 and 5 for example)

I've tried fooling around with the max history, but it's no change.
Settings for the media library with the news items is history to -1 and auto watch is enabled.

Anybody a suggestion how to get rid of those double items ?

Kind regards,

André

I guess theissue is having two histories in parallel, one at the script level AND one at the media lib level.
Both would (in your case) have the history count set to the total number of available tracks in your '/Newsitems' lib.
This would it make impossible to schedule a 'correct' track from that lib:
At first the media lib history is checked...this should at this point result in a non matching track (against the media lib history) - fine at this point!
But now the script history is checked in addition...but now every resulting track would be checked again (against the script history)...and this would typically fail at this level, since after some runs all media lib tracks are present in the script history. Finally ProppFrexx (after a fixed amount of retries resp. after detecting, that all items have been tried) ignores the history check - this to prevent the script line from failing totally - this is a kind of internal deadlock detection. As a result the next media lib track scheduled at this point is simply takeen without any history check. And this might exactly be a track already scheduked previously.
So please do the following:
Remove the script history entirely or set the script history count to a low value (e.g. 1 or 2).
It should work fine then.

You can also set the library history to -1 and auto watch on. In the script disable the history.
In this way, when you have made a media library from a folder, you can freely add and remove the newsitems in that folder. Proppfrexx will detect changes and corrects the history amounts . -1 means the history size is always the amount of tracks in the folder.

I use this in the same way for a "these are the new hits" script... first a opener is played and then 3 random snippets are selected. By setting -1, all tracks have to be played before a snippet wil reoccur.