Music is the heart of radio. Even if your station is predominantly talk-based, chances are you’ll still be using various imaging techniques like jingles, drops, station IDs and more. No matter the format, managing an ever-growing collection of audio files becomes essential.
Streamlining the management of your music library pays dividends. The more efficient the system, the less manual work needed, freeing up time for creativity and engagement.
Let’s jump into the best strategies for managing your station’s media — and how Radio Cult makes it easier than ever.
Organizing Your Library with Categories & Tags
Categorizing your music is a no-brainer. As well as relying on the built in audio metadata – like artist, album and more – adding custom categories can make managing your online station’s audio library a lot easier.
Tags are a great way to add custom categories to your media library. Creating and adding custom tags to your audio files helps in a few ways.
- It acts as a pseudo-folder structure: putting all of your audio files into folders isn’t always the best way to organise them. It sounds great at first, but you end up sacrificing visibility. It can be hard to find those files once they’re nested too deep. Also, you can’t include a file in multiple folders. Tagging solves this for you. All of your files stay at the top level while still being sorted into multiple different buckets (i.e. the tags).
- It helps with visual identification: tags can be given different colours which lets you quickly identify a tag and what tags a track has at a glance. Custom tags with custom colours sounds simple but it can be a powerful tool for organising your media using a system that makes sense for you.
- It unlocks smart automation and playlist building: we’ll dive more into this down below. To be brief, tagging media allows you to create smart, powerful playlists based off of those same tags.
ID3 Metadata
We can’t forget about the basics though. Accurate ID3 tags ensure proper categorization. Luckily, Radio Cult automatically extracts this metadata on upload. We’ll even try to intelligently fill any missing properties for you. And, of course, everything remains editable for fine-tuning.
Filtering & Sorting
Any radio platform worth it’s salt – and we like to think Radio Cult is one of them – will offer you various tools to search, filter and sort on the media in your library.
This section doesn’t need much explaining, being able to filter your media based on certain search criteria comes in handy in multiple ways:
- Quickly locating specific tracks,
- Bulk editing and deleting media, or adding tags,
- Building playlists efficiently
Filtering and sorting on your media is a core part of managing your media library efficiently.
Building Smarter Playlists
At the end of the day, you’re doing all of this organisation so you can actually use your media files. A well-organized library is only useful if it translates into great programming. Playlists play a central role in curating content.
Here at Radio Cult, we provide you with multiple ways to create playlists. As you’d expect, you can build standard static playlists, with shuffle options. However, we also provide a much more powerful paradigm to build and manage your playlists: custom tags.
Custom tags allow you to quickly spin up new playlists with a fraction of the effort. They make creating and managing playlists easier than you could imagine and unlock powerful programming techniques. Instead of adding hundred or thousands of songs, simply add a few tags and you’re done.
When a tagged track is played, we ensure intelligent and fresh selection by considering recent plays—even across different playlists and events. This allows for smart rotation across your daily, weekly and even monthly schedule.
You don’t have to use tags to build your playlists if you don’t want to though. Static playlists still have their time and place! For example, when you have know exactly what songs you want to play out and in what order.
Even better, why not combine the two? Mix and match tags and static songs and toggle shuffle on or off to spin up powerful playlists in just a few clicks. For example, patterns like playing a jingle every 8 songs or playing 20% pop songs and 80% rock are trivial to accomplish.
As you can see, managing your playlists with custom tags makes managing your media library much easier.
Customization That Works for You
Using all of the above, we can land on an organisational structure that makes sense for you. No two radio stations operate the same way. That’s why customization is key. The customizability of Radio Cult’s media library functionality is key to reducing friction and building a workflow that makes sense for you.
Create custom tags, turn on and off and even rearrange columns on your media library, use filters and search queries, create playlists statically or via tags and more. Organisational tools are nothing if they’re too strict and don’t work for you. Radio Cult lets you build your own system to manage your radio station’s media.
That’s a wrap
That’s everything for now. You should now be more aware of common organizational practices for managing your radio station’s music library.
Remember to find what works for you! Best practices are ultimately just a suggestion. Focus on what truly matters: running an amazing radio station.