Cue Point and Metadata Troubleshooting

Also see:

• Cue Point Alignment in Station Manager

• Cue Point and Metadata Monitoring

• Why Metadata Matters

• Content Delivery webinar recording

What is Cue Point Metadata and Where Does it Come From?

Cue point metadata is information coming from the files played by your Radio Automation System (RAS). In most setups, the information is sent by the RAS to Triton’s Station Manager (SM) encoding software where it is then converted into Triton’s proprietary format (STWcue) by a component called RAS Adapter. The metadata is encapsulated with the audio into the stream and then sent to Triton’s Content Delivery Network for distribution. It will subsequently be read and used by various components of Triton’s products as well as by players and apps (see below) to do a variety of things.

Nearly all of the cue point metadata on your streams is generated from the files in your RAS. Triton’s systems never generate metadata without first having had an instruction to do so via RAS metadata (inserted ads metadata for example).

The timing of metadata is also never modified once it is inserted into the audio stream.

Example of STWcue metadata once it is encapsulated in a stream (XML):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<stwcue xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" version="1" xmlns="http://www.streamtheworld.com/metadata/stwcue-1.0">
    <mount>BLORK-FM Mount</mount>
    <cuepoint type="track" timestamp="1406569181652" cache="true">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="cue_title">Summertime Sadness</attribute>
            <attribute name="cue_time_duration">234000</attribute>
            <attribute name="program_id">Test</attribute>
            <attribute name="track_artist_name">Lana Del Rey</attribute>
            <attribute name="track_album_name">Summertime Sadness</attribute>
            <attribute name="track_album_publisher">EMI Music</attribute>
        </attributes>
    </cuepoint>
</stwcue>

Types of Metadata

After being processed by RAS Adapter, metadata will be one of two main types: Track or Ad.

• Track: Generally indicates the content being played is a song or music element.

• Ad: Generally indicates the content being played is an ad and or that the station is in a commercial break. This includes content being played to signal the end of a break (ENDBREAK).

The metadata type is determined by the mapping configuration of RAS Adapter. (See the RAS Adapter 5 User Guide for information on how to configure RAS Adapter.)

Timing of Metadata

Timing of metadata is very important, particularly for great sounding transitions coming in and out of commercial breaks. When a station is first on-boarded to Triton’s streaming services, our Implementation team takes great care in making sure the metadata is properly synced to the audio events of your stream.

In time, the alignment of metadata to the audio content of the stream may drift to the point that transitions are misaligned, resulting in the listener hearing the end of the last commercial under it, or interrupting the elements after the break on the rejoin. Consult the Cue Point Alignment Tool article to troubleshoot and adjust metadata timing.

How Does Cue Point Metadata Affect Content on my Station?

Metadata is crucial to many of Triton’s features. They are the only source of information by which many of Triton’s mechanisms will trigger. For example, without proper metadata the system cannot:

• Insert or replace mid-roll ads in your stream, as it will not know when a commercial break is happening on the stream.

• Come out of a break at the right time.

• Produce Royalty Reports as it will not know which songs played and when they played.

• Show Now Playing information on your apps and players.

• Perform commands for an Omny Studio live stream recording agent.

Read more in Why Metadata Matters.

Changes in your RAS files may affect the metadata on your stream!

If changes are made to the metadata in your RAS files, the RAS Adapter mapping may also need to be adjusted. If not, situations may arise where one or more types of metadata will no longer be inserted as desired into the stream. This can result in loss of key functionality, such as your ads no longer being inserted.

How Can I Confirm that there is Metadata Present on a Station’s Stream?

There are several ways of confirming if metadata is or is not present on a station’s stream. See below for details.

Your Station’s Web Player

Go to your station’s official web player. If it is showing the song information, it is most likely that (at least Track) metadata is flowing through the stream.

Triton’s Stream Debugger Tool

The absolute best way to see metadata passing through the stream is to use the Triton Stream Debugger Tool.

See the article on Cue Point and Metadata Monitoring for information on how to use the Stream Debugger tool.

In the Stream Debugger Tool, metadata will show up in the Cue Points window:

If you hear your station playing but there is no information in the Cue Point window, it is a very good indication there is something to troubleshoot on your encoding machine or with your RAS (see below).

Note that you may see an ad cue point at the very start of the stream. This is most likely an in-stream pre-roll. This pre-roll is NOT generated by an element in your RAS but rather a configuration of your stream. To properly validate if your station is sending ad break cue points, please make sure to listen to your stations until you hear an ad break and verify if there is an accompanying mid-roll ad break cue point.

TAP Explore Reports

As our system will never insert ads if ad break metadata is not present in the stream, it follows that if you see mid-roll impressions being delivered to a station in TAP Explore, it is a very good indication that metadata is present in the stream.

What do I Check if I am Not Seeing Metadata on my Streams?

If you have been a Triton customer for a while, your engineering team should be intimately familiar with our Station Manager software, RAS adapter and how to configure it. If not, we highly suggest making sure they are by having them familiarize themselves with our RAS Adapter documentation.

Verifying if Station Manager is getting Metadata from Your RAS

When encountering metadata issues, the first step is to verify whether metadata is being received by the Station Manager software. To do so, check the RAS Adapter configuration on the streaming computer. Follow these steps:

1. Open the Station Manager application.

2. Click on the RAS Adapter tab.

3. Select the RAS chain you want to check.

4. Navigate to Advanced and then RAW Stream.
   

If the RAW Stream section is empty, it indicates that no data is being received by Station Manager. Perhaps the data is being sent on another port or perhaps the data is not being sent at all from the source (your RAS).

We suggest talking to your station engineer or the person in charge of metadata in your company.

Note that our Station Manager encoding software is listening to a specific port. If your RAS has changed its configuration and is sending to a different port, then the SM needs to also be updated to listen to that port.

Set Metadata (Cue Point) Alerts

Using the Triton Console, It is possible for you to set up alerts for each of your stations separately. These alerts will send you a notification when metadata has not been received by our system for a configurable amount of time.

Learn how to set up Cue Point alerts by navigating to the Monitoring section of the Console Guide’s Edit Station Configuration page.

We recommend the alerts be sent to a distribution list email to multiple people rather than direct employee emails. If your staff changes, you can easily ask your email administrators to swap recipients instead of having to reconfigure every station manually in the Console.