With hundreds, if not thousands, of tracks in your station library, organizing and searching for tracks as well as creating playlists can be tedious tasks. Wouldn't it be great to easily identify similar tracks? That's where Track Categories come in.
Track Categories (formerly called Tags)
The Live365 dashboard gives you the option to create and utilize Track Categories to make managing and maintaining your internet radio station easy.
Categories are a Live365-internal way of labeling the tracks in your library. You define your own Categories, being as creative, specific, or broad as you'd like. Each track can have multiple Categories. (Not to be confused with Media Types, which are Live365-defined and each track can only have one Type.)
Below are some common ways that broadcasters organize their libraries:
- By genre - If your station intends to play more than one genre of music, this is an easy way to differentiate.
- Examples: rock, pop, hip hop, gospel, classical, etc.
- By decade - You might have songs from different decades in your library. If you're planning to build decade-centric playlists, decade Categories will be very helpful.
- Examples: '50s, '60s, '70s, etc. (You can even go one step further and create year-specific Categories like '75, '76, '77, etc.)
- By mood - For smoother transitions and to aid in balancing your playlists, you can categorize tracks by mood. Listeners are also becoming more interested in activity and mood-based programming as opposed to genre-based programming, so this kind of categorization can also assist with curating that kind of programming.
- Examples: upbeat, chill, fierce, sad, happy, etc.
- By upload date - Categorize by year or month that the track was uploaded to keep tabs on when you upload new tracks. When you are refreshing your library, you can delete the oldest tracks and add in some new ones.
- Examples: year, month, month/year, month/day/year
- By language - If you have multiple tracks in different languages than your station's "primary language," use language Categories to make the tracks easier to recognize.
- Examples: Spanish, Swedish, Korean, French, etc.
- By popularity - Come up with your own system for recent hits, timeless tracks, and everything in between, so you can effortlessly work the biggest hits into your playlists. Want to learn more about making your own system for categorizing? See our articles on categorizing and coding a music library.
- Examples: Gold/Oldies, Recurrent, Hot, etc.
* Again, each track can have more than one Category. For example, a single track could be labeled as: Pop, Spanish, Upbeat, '90s, and Dance.
How Do I Create and Assign Categories?
Once you're logged in to your Live365 dashboard, you can begin creating Categories by selecting Media -> Categories from the Station Menu navigation bar. In that pane, you'll be able to add new categories by creating a descriptive Category name and associating a color with it. From there, you can begin adding Categories to your tracks during the upload process or in your library using the individual or bulk edit features. Follow our step-by-step guide to create and assign Categories to some or all of the tracks in your library.
* Tip: If you're looking to hide tracks from AutoDJ, meaning you'd like to take them out of rotation without having to delete them for a period of time, use the "Do Not Play" flag.
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Article Image: A stack of vinyl records. (BRRT via Pixabay.)
