I did quite a bit of work on the scheduling system yesterday, trying to figure it out.
For single pieces (not chapters or serials in some way), I have divided them by length and put them into 5 different buckets:
- short : less than 4 minutes
- m1 : 4-10 minutes
- m2 : 10-20 minutes
- m3: 20-30 minutes
- long: more than 30 minutes
The scheduler works by whole hours. So I wanted to come up with a scheme that would fill an hour but not use up all of my library of short works to do it. I think I arrived at a pretty good system. At least, I understand it better.
The scheduler does not go through and find an item that is just the right size. It picks randomly from the size bucket that I put in that spot. When the top of the hour approaches it finishes what is running then jumps to the start of the next hour as soon as that item is done. That means we will miss the real wall-clock hour mark by +/- the size of a small item.
Of course we can put in station ID and someday have underwriting messages and blurbs about upcoming features, etc. That kind of padding may help get me closer to real top-of-the-hour.
Well anyway, I messed around with it yesterday and got a scheme for doing a Long, then some mediums (depending on how the time is progressing) and fill the last little bit with shorts. It works out that M3 mediums don’t fit in. So I will have another hour scheme which uses two M3 slots followed by shorter slots and ending with some shorts. Our hours will be loaded toward the front with longer selections.
For serials, book chapters, things like that, I plan to schedule those manually to fill up an hour as much as I can then let the scheduler use shorter pieces to finish up. You can tell I will need a _lot_ of short pieces to keep from being too repetitious.
Right now we are planning to have 8 hours of “new” material every day, some of those hours will be the next chapters of books we are working through and some will be just random from the library. Then we repeat that two times to make 24 hours. We’ve been thinking about how to keep things moving along but not go so fast that a person missing their regular timeslot is then missing large chunks of the story. I’m also considering having some kind of re-cap day, maybe weekends (?) where we run through the chapters again? Just feeling our way along about this. I guess it is possible to have some combination of repeats during a day and over multiple days. I’d love to hear comments about this.