If you are using ClockWheels or Playlists to program your Live365 station and you are placing Station IDs or jingles before ad breaks, you might experience issues with the ID being cut off short by the ad break. This happens because of how the streaming servers and the ad network function together.
The ads provided to us don't all have an exact, consistent duration (e.g. 30 seconds and 0 milliseconds). Therefore, if any of the ads in an ad break are 1, 2, or 3 seconds longer, the listener may hear the Station ID being cut off by the ad break.
Ad spots are specified in a few different durations: 30, 60, 90, or 120 seconds. While the duration of our ad trigger file exactly matches the specified durations, some ads may not have a strict length. For example, our 120-second ad trigger file is exactly that duration, but some ads may not have the strict 120:00-second length. Some of them might be 120:04 seconds, 120:50 seconds, or 121 seconds.
However, it's important to note that while one listener may hear an ID cut short, other listeners in different locations may hear the full ID play out before the ad. This is because when multiple listeners are connected to your station and hearing the same audio feed at the moment when an ad is being triggered, they are hearing different ads that are geo-targeted based on the listener location. For example, a listener from California can hear a different ad spot than one from New York.
Therefore, a listener in a different location than you might hear a 120:00-second ad that fits exactly on your station, while your listening session might deliver an ad of 121 seconds, which would cut the ID off by 1 second.
How can you work around this?
There are two ways of compensating for this ad length variance.
- Avoid scheduling files that are shorter than 10 seconds (like IDs/Promos) between ads.
- If you still want to use an ID between ads, there is a workaround for this as well. We recommend adding a silent span at the beginning of each ID. You should add 1 second of silence for every 30 seconds of ads running:
- If you run ads for 30 seconds, you need 1 second of silence at the beginning of your IDs.
- If you run ads for 60 seconds, you need 2 seconds of silence at the beginning of your IDs.
- If you run ads for 90 seconds, you need 3 seconds of silence at the beginning of your IDs.
- If you run ads for 120 seconds, you need 4 seconds of silence at the beginning of your IDs. (Or, you can upload a 4-second silent file to your library, categorize it as a "silent file," and insert this category within your ClockWheels between your ID and the 120-second ad breaks.)