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Short answer? Start again. It's user-unfriendly, unnecessarily complicated and lessens the enthusiastic drive form an amateur to build a station due to every stage being self defeating with endless rules that suck the life out of you. For those of you who have mastered it, well done, feel a nice glow of zen-like achievement. It's just a bad web platform in a zero-return market with not much to offer. Let me explain why I think this so.
After spending a few contented years on the now defunct Live365, I decided to try Radionomy. Seeing as it's free, I didn't expect much. In fact, you cannot expect much unless you are hosting a station playing generic Top 40 chart music, RnB or country... (and if so, why? There are millions of you).
Having laboured through the ridiculously over-complicated and sometimes illegible planning documents (#1 I would suggest a better technical writer), I saw the parallels between Live365 and here in how to upload, tag, fix for broadcast, learn the labyrinthian 'clock' method and set about building a station.
My station would be wholly 100% own-content of audio-drama and presenter-led shows. Yet after the days of uploading and tagging the near 1000 'soundtracks' (one of the myriad of limits encountered on Radionomy), then bundling them into playlists it has proven a fruitless exercise. Where Live365 was easy, visual, straightforward, Radionomy is a complete cluster of complexity that would lessen anyone's interest in considering it as a decent platform for their output.
Of course the model is to use you to market their draw on advertising revenue. You paid Live365 for copyright, Radionomy makes you pay in obfuscation and circles (or is that 'clocks?') Ultimately it is better and more fulfilling to design / commission your own website, build a brand, do away with parasitic advertisers as Radionomy and be more in control. Yes it costs, takes longer, more bureaucracy, but each step is logical with build/player/copyright licencing/creative control on your side in the long term whereby you as an individual decide, you achieve and you choose where to market yourself and which advertising to whore yourself to. If you are one of 60,000 choices on a single site, what do you think are your chances (if not hawking familiar published music to the masses)?
Case in point; the day planning rigmarole of discovering if a complete show is a 'playlist' then it is not touched (uncheck 'truncate' etc) but it'll still be crashed by the next playlist item either way due to the advertising. In Live365 there was a way to get around this by including a long playlist to jump in between playlists after the last one finishes and the next one begins. Possibly with further days and hours I could figure out a way on here, that was simply intuitive on Live365. I could have given over more patience had I been able to reach the stage of actually progressing toward getting a station up. But no. At least not me, not here. If you like jukebox style or maybe live podcasting it may suit but for shows where the whole is a sum of parts then it's a lot less attractive.
Now bear with me... (The tl:dr people? Learn to read) After compiling all the playlists into the day planner, fitting it all exactly from 5:00-4:59 each day even allowing for most of the playlisted audiodramas to be cut in and out by each other thus destroying any sense of listening to them, I headed to the planning page. That's where the bomb dropped. The errors of each of the days proved to be a sort of Kafkaesque piss-take, in that I would be left with not much to play. Now, having all the content correctly tagged as would pass Live365's restrictions first time (and remember the rules for broadcast are more or less the same here), at least 40% of my content was in the logs as being taken out for some infraction or other. Exasperation is not the word.
More studied silence into moving well away from this platform. Imagine your own work spat back for infractions that make no sense. Leaving you with the task of sieving through 1000 'soundtracks' to re-tag, double-check (and with the added ignominy of removing the automatically inserted fade points (for the love of all that is good man, why?), you face a mammoth task of going backwards and forwards until you have contorted your content into a meaningless audio pile of unlistenable rubbish, but at least have satisfied the rules. That's good so. It is free after all.
Zero creativity, zero inspiration, zero interest. Anyway, lesson learned. Some have the knack on some platforms to get the best of it for them, in my case it just wasn't to be. As a radio hobbyist this looked like a great avenue but with dwindling listener rates, a not-so-hot niche, and the painful advertising plus rules upon rules whether by Radionomy's doing or not, have rendered this type of platform redundant as a creative force.
Conclusively Radionomy and its unwieldy, over-complicated system makes you fall out of love with radio, reducing you to a box-clicking, reloading drone with baggy eyelids, hoping for a drip of recognition that their whole platform here fails to supply. Radionomy? Ignominy!
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Win situation for Radio Producers & Radionomy.
