Myriad Media AutoImporter v5 - Version History

v5.32.1 28th March 2023

No major changes.

v5.31.4 5th October 2022

No major changes.

v5.31.2 2nd August 2022

No major changes.

v5.31.1 29th June 2022

New Features/Changes:

Import Settings:

• There is a new setting to "Pre-create Preview files for remote users" - this will create the Opus Preview files for all imported audio so it's ready to be used by Myriad Anywhere or RVT users without needing Remote Edit Server to create them on demand.
• If an importer is set to delete a file after import, all related files are now deleted as well - i.e. files that have the same filename, but a different extension. For example when importing C:\temp\myfile.wav any related files such as c:\temp\myfile.xml and c:\temp\myfile.csv will also be deleted.

Notifications:

• If an import notification cannot be sent then a log entry is added to the log with the information about the send failure.

v5.29.2 19th January 2022

New Features/Changes:

Importer Settings:

• There is a new Scheduling Overrides options "Allow this item to be Time Stretched if needed" which allows you to control whether items imported via this group can be prevented from being time stretched - for example, you might turn this on for some types of pre-recorded show. This option is on by default.

The following issues have been fixed:

• Every 3 to 4 weeks after the PC was rebooted AutoImporter could get confused over how long until it should next check some groups set to update over longer periods e.g. once an hour etc.
• If an importer group was set to import into a specific media id, but a file in the folder did not match the filename pattern then the error message was not showing the filename correctly.
• Opening an Importer Group settings would sometimes not show the display fully.
• If a Media file had a related CUE file, and was set to be deleted after import, the cue file was being left behind.

v5.29.1 7th December 2021

Important:

Notifications:

• As previously announced in v5.22 (February 2020), and in v5.26 (March 2021), the legacy method for sending Emails has now been removed. If you were using this method to send notification emails you should now switch to the Notification based system intead.
• The Notification system supports a much wider variety of notifications including Twitter DM and Pushover as well as supporting TLS based email servers.
• You will need to configure the Email Server settings in the Myriad Database Settings window in Myriad Playout or Myriad Schedule, then you can set the Notification Subscribers on the Importer Group Settings window for each group.

New Features/Changes:

• Advert Import: The AutoImporter can now detect and import Advert Scheduling information in transport files. If you need to make sure that any imported adverts are not automatically marked as ready to schedule due to information in the transport file, then you can either force the category to be "held", or use the new "When importing Adverts, remove any Requested Play information for the Myriad Advert Scheduler" option.
• You can now edit AutoImporter Groups on any computer running AutoImporter and it will automatically detect the changes and reload it's settings as soon as all groups have finished any active imports.
• Log Files are now written into a new sub folder under the Logs folder in the main Myriad Data Location.
• CUE Files: AutoImporter now looks for supported CUE files next to each audio file and will automatically import the contents as Now Playing items that Myriad Playout can then use during Playout. This works for file and FTP sources, but is not supported for HTTP sources.

The following issues have been fixed:

• Importing from an FTP source: The AutoImporter would check all sub directories regardless of the setting in Importer Settings.

v5.28.2 7th September 2021

New Features/Changes:

• Retrieve files to a directory: You can now specify "File Directory" as the destination type to have AutoImporter check for new files from a file location, http site or FTP server, and then download any new content into that directory. For example, you might want AutoImporter to download a set of XML Scheduled Log files that contain the Main log that will later be imported into the Scheduled Log.
• You can include Myriad data locations in the destination directory by a new special variable surrounded by percent symbols- for example %MyriadLogs% will download to the Logs directory in the main data location, %MyriadData% will download to the main Myriad data directory. You can also include system environment variables such as %AppData%

The following issues have been fixed:

• Importing from an HTTP source: You would erroneously recieve a message that you had to specify a filename to import from when creating a new importer.
• Importing from an FTP source: The AutoImporter would check all sub directories regardless of the setting in Importer Settings.

v5.28.1 11th August 2021

New Features/Changes:

• HTTP Downloads: Auto Importer can now import a single specified file from an HTTP or HTTPS link.
• FTP Downloads: Auto Importer can now import a single specified file or scan a remote folder and subdirectories from an FTP site. In this mode, you can set it to download everything it finds, or instead only new or changed items.
• Additional options have been added to the checking period to allow checking at a specific time once every hour or a specified time once every day.  If either of these 2 options are configured for an Importer Group, and the download fails, Auto Importer will retry the download every 5 seconds for the next 2 minutes, and then give up until the next hour or day.

Scheduling Overrides:

• The Importer will now automatically remove any attribute information that is being imported from the source file (e.g. a transport file that contains category/type/gender etc.) for any stations that do not exist in this system. For example you may recieve a Transport file from a Site that has 4 stations, but you only have a single station in your database, so do not want the information for the second third and fourth station to be imported.
• There is a new option on the Scheduling Overrides tab "Do not import any existing attribute information from the source file" which will remove any attribute information that is already in the source file. You can then use the list above to add in any specific attributes you DO want to be applied to all items this importer imports.

v5.27.1 27th April 2021

New Features/Changes:

Display:

• There is a new View menu which contains options to sort the importers alphabetically and also to group by Item Type.
• The Expand and Collapse all groups menu options have moved to the new View menu.
• Importer groups now show an icon to the left of their name to show what type of items they are configured to import.
• The Media Browser menu item has moved to the new View menu.

v5.26.2 29th March 2021

New Features/Changes:

Importer Notifications:

• The import success notifications now include the duration of the new media item that has been imported.
• Email notifications via Database Settings>Notifications: You can now send messages via an SMTP server that requires TLS encrypted messages.
• Important: The "older" method of sending email notifications (set in Application Settings) does NOT support sending TLS messages. This method will be removed in a future version of the AutoImporter, so you should plan to migrate to using Database based Notifications soon.

The following issues have been fixed:

• Importer overrides: The override to set the delete after time was reguarly resetting to 12:00:00.  This has now been fixed, but you may need to re-set your overrides on some importer groups.

v5.26.1 8th March 2021

New Features/Changes:

Importer Group Settings:

• There are new options to automatically set the End date and Delete After date to a number of days/hours/minutes/seconds after import. These can be found are on the Basic Overrides tab.
• The option to preserve existing information now also preserves the Display As and Display By fields, as well as any existing Start, End and Delete after dates.
• If a Media or Transport file cannot be imported, the original media item's details are restored to the Media Item so that the existing information is preserved. The audio has already been deleted, to cannot be restored, but by restoring the information it means that any existing information will be there for the next attempt, for example preserving existing item titling etc.

User Security:

• There is a new File Locations option that allows you to specify a different Directory Database Name. This is useful for situations where you need to use a different user database for totally separate stations. This setting is stored per profile, so will affect all Myriad Applications on the same PC.

v5.25.4 19th January 2021

No major changes.

v5.25.3 6th January 2021

No major changes.

v5.25.2 15th December 2020

New Features/Changes:

Importer Group Settings:

• The AutoImporter now refreshes it's list of available attributes whenever you open the Edit Group window so it can show you any newly created categories/tags etc. without needing to be restarted.

v5.25.1 25th November 2020

New Features/Changes:

Per-Station/Multi-Attribute assignment options:

• To support Myriad Playout's new ability to have separate Categories per station, Secondary Categories, multiple Tags and Myriad Schedule Plus's new Types, Genders and Eras Attributes, AutoImporter now has a new Scheduling Overrides Tab that allows you to assign which Attributes should be automatically applied to items imported via each Importer Group.

CSV File Import:

• The Headers are now case insensitive making it easer to import a list of items provided via a CSV file.

Window Options:

• There are 2 new options in Application Settings that you control if AutoImporter should minimise to the System Tray, and whether it should start minimised.

v5.24.2 September 2020

New Features/Changes:

Importer Group Settings:

• Overrides: You can now specify the Ending Type of the new Media, as well as if it should be marked to "Play As Sweeper"
• Overrides: You can now specify the Media ID as a tag to be included in Overrides - for example setting the External Reference to "AD<MEDIAID>" would set it to something like AD12345.

v5.24.1 19th August 2020

New Features/Changes:

Event Logging:

• The AutoImporter now logs actions into the Directory User History - for example when importing a new media file.

v5.23 (Release 2) 17th June 2020

New Features/Changes:

Importing Overrides:

• You can now set an override for the External Reference. For example you might configure the Importer to set the FileTitle of the imported file as the External Reference e.g. MUS12345.mp3 will be imported into a Media Item and the External Reference would be set to MUS12345.

Overwriting existing items:

• There is a new option that configures the AutoImporter to check to see if an existing item on the MediaWall has the same External Reference as this item will have (either by the Override option above, or by the Database Setting to automatically set the External Reference to the 'filetitle') and if so to overwrite that, rather than hunting for a suitable free Media Item within a range.

The following issues have been fixed:

• Import SS32 Audio Files: in certain files the "EOM" marker was not being imported and Myriad was unable to then fallback on Auto-Extro detection.

v5.23 13th May 2020

New Features/Changes:

Importing Transport files:

• By default, Transport Files will now keep their original Media Item Type (e.g. "Song") when they are imported, and will not have the imported item's Item Type changed to match the "Destination Media Item Type" setting. There is a new option to on the Group Settings under "Destination Media" to "Force the Media Item Type to match the Destination Type" to force the item to have the specified item type when it is imported.

Notifications:

• Email: The way emails are sent to the SMTP server has been changed to improve performance and compatibility with some SMTP server implementations. This only affects the new Notification based emails.

v5.22 (Release 2) 9th April 2020

New Features/Changes:

Importer Groups:

• You can now override the normalisation mode per group. By default it will still use the Database setting for the Media Range, but you can now override this to force either Peak or RMS normalisation to a specified level.
• You can now mark a group to "Only run this group on this PC" which allows you to have a group work for only a single PC - ideal where you want split Importer workloads across multiple workstations.
• There are 2 new menu options available to Import and Export AutoImporter Group configuration's to a settings file. This makes it very easy to distribute importer groups settings to other workstations or databases.
• The initial scanning of a folder is now significantly faster.

Media Import:

• SS32 Audio files: Myriad can now import significantly more information from Scott Studios SS32 systems, including "Rotator" items and will even use the new External Reference field to cross reference with the original SS32 items to autopopulate the Myriad Rotating Media Item list. These items are also flagged on their description line with "** SS32 Rotator **".
• SS32 Non-Audio files: AutoImporter now checks for the specific type of invalid audio format information that SS32 uses to mark some of it's files so that it doesn't try to import those as audio.

The following issues have been fixed:

• New Group: Saving a new group could cause AutoImporter to exit in certain circumstances.
• Editing a Group: The Categories drop down would not show the available list of categories when you re-opened an existing AutoImporter Group to edit.
• Notifications: If you specified multiple email recipients in a notification, then some or all recipients may not recieve the notification email.
• (Release 2 refresh): Fixed an issue where the Import into Media Range was not correctly restricting items if they started with a non-matching Media ID.

v5.22 26th February 2020

New Features/Changes:

Notifications:

• Importer Groups now have new Notification options to send notifications using the standard methods of Email, Twitter DM and Pushover. These can be set in the Importer Settings window
• The existing email options are still available, but will likely be removed in a future release as the same message options are available via the new Notifications system instead.
• You can specify the Priority for a Pushover notification by appending a number from -2 (meaning lowest) to 2 (Meaning emergency) - for example pushover:ABCDEFGHIGKL:1  would send as a "High Priority".
• Messages sent with Emergency Priority will be resent by Pushover every 2 minutes (up to a maximum of 1 hour) until they are "Acknowledged" in the Pushover app.

Checking for Updates (Experimental new feature):

• There is a new menu option on the Help menu which will check for any updates to Myriad Media AutoImporter. This will only check for "Full Release" status updates.

The following issues have been fixed:

• When clicking File>Exit, the AutoImporter would close even if you chose "no" to not close.

v5.21 (Release 3) 6th January 2020

The following issues have been fixed:

• Adding a Fixed Extro would not be set correctly if the audio had any silence automatically removed at the start of the file.

v5.21 20th November 2019

The following issues have been fixed:

• AutoImporter would display a message box if the audio information could not be read from a file, and you would need to click Ok before that importer group could be used to import anything else.

Other internal changes:

• HA transitioned to dedicated AC.

v5.19 10th September 2019

New Features/Changes:

Display options:

• You can now expand/collapse Importer Groups.
• There is a new option on the Importer Group Settings that allows you to set if a Group should be collapsed by default.
• There is a new set of options on the Importers Menu that allows you to quickly Start/Stop/Expand/Collapse ALL Importer Groups.

v5.18 (Release 2) June 2019

The following issues have been fixed:

• The AutoImporter would close if the filename or directory was too long for Windows to be able to access the file - Windows has a limit of 260 characters for parts of the Directory and/or filename.
• Importing an mp3 file could sometimes cause Myriad AutoImporter to close.
• AutoImporter would not import files listed in a CSV file where the audio filename contained international characters.

v5.18 18th June 2019

New Features/Changes:

Myriad Schedule options:

• There are several new options on the Overrides Tab that allow you to control how Myriad Schedule should work with imported items
• When overwriting an existing Media Item, you can now choose to "Keep the existing 'Scheduling' information - for example you may have setup an Hour Restriction grid on an existing item and just want to replace the audio - this will keep the existing Category and Allow/Prevent scheduling options as well as the Hour Restrictions grid.
• There is a new option to control if new items can be considered by Myriad Schedule or not. By default newly imported items are NOT considered for scheduling so that you can review the audio before it can be automatically scheduled.

Media Import:

• Myriad Auto Importer now checks for a CSV file with the same file name as the audio file from the I Like Music download service and automatically imports all available information such as Titling and Copyright details.
• AutoImporter now carries out a special pre-import scan when importing mp3 files to enable it to import mp3 files that would previously have been rejected or imported with poor results, it can also now handle a much wider variety of CBR mp3 files which previously these would have been rejected as an "unknown audio format".

The following issues have been fixed:

• The AutoImporter would sometimes fail to import if the audio file contained multiple "category" or genre encodings, or if importing over the top of an existing item that had a Category set and the option to keep the previous item's details was turned on.

v5.17 May 2019

CSV file based import:

• You can now use a CSV file as a list of files to import into specific Media IDs
• The CSV file must have at least 2 columns - MediaID and Filename.
• The Importer Group must be configured with the Destination Media options set to a specific Media ID or a specified Media Range.
• The AutoImporter will then look for any CSV files that match the filename criteria and then read in the Media ID and filename. The Media ID is then checked against the Destination Media ID settings, and if valid, it then checks if the audio file exists in the exact location in the filename field - If the file cannot be found, it then checks for that audio file in the same folder as the CSV file. Once the audio file has been found it then proceeds to check if it should be imported using the normal import process as if the Importer had found the audio file directly.

v5.17 15th April 2019

The following issues have been fixed:

• Category Overrides: Setting a category override would not apply that category and could cause an issue that prevented Myriad Playout from being able to alter that category.

v5.16 February 2019

New Features:

• There is a new Importer Group setting "When replacing an existing item, keep the existing Title, first Artist, Categorisation, Year and images." which is useful when overwriting and existing item if you want to preserve the older item's Title/Artist etc.
• There is a new Importer Group setting that allows you to control whether files that fail to import are moved to the "Failed!" sub-directory.
• Additional debug logging has been added in Maximum Debug mode.

The following issues have been fixed:

• Several small bugs fixed that cause a exit in conflict situations.
• The AutoImporter would exit if a file was found that started with a very large number - e.g. "123456789123456789123456.wav"
• Files were not being moved into the Failed! sub-directory if they failed to import.

v5.15 13th November 2018

The following issues have been fixed:

• Email notification: Turning off the "Send Email Notifications" setting in the Importer Group Settings would not stop emails being sent.
• Media Import: Importing a media file with corrupt XML data in a WAV file would cause Myriad to exit.
• Media Import: AutoImporter was not using the database "AutoTop" setting, so would not automatically remove silence from the start of media files during import.
• Unavailble import locations: If a location became unavailable after AutoImporter had started, then the AutoImporter would exit the next time it tried to check for new files to import.

v5.14 (Release 2) 24th September 2018

The following issues have been fixed:

• Importing Media: Further detection has been added for importing some mp3 files encoded with very unusual mpeg encoding which results in the audio playing back at a lower speed.

v5.14 12th September 2018

New Features/Changes:

There are now several "tags" you can use in Title/Artist/Description Overrides, for example you can insert the current date or time, and the name of the computer that the Importer is running on. A full list can be found by clicking the "Add" button next to each text box in the Settings window.

The following issues have been fixed:

Overrides:

• If you set an Extro Override to "Set the Extro to be this back from the end" with a value of 0 (to force the extro to remain at the end of the file), this was being ignored and the Auto-Extro was being used instead.

v5.12 12th July 2018

New Features/Changes:

The very first time AutoImporter is run it will now automatically create 3 example Importer Groups.

The following issues have been fixed:

Settings:

• If you entered SMTP settings when first running AutoImporter they would not be remembered.

Email Notifications:

• Import Success email notifications were only being sent for Transport Files.
• Transport File import would not work on some systems.

v5.11 Release 2 June 2018

The following issues have been fixed:

Importing files starting with a Media Id:

• Entering an invalid email address could cause AutoImporter to exit when processing an import or re-editing the settings.

v5.11 June 2018

New Features/Changes:

This update adds several new options making it easier to import files that use semi-generic filenames but you want to import them into fixed Media ID's each week.

A great example of this is the Chris Country syndicated show from www.chriscountry.co.uk - each segment of the show is delivered with filenames similar to "CCWeekly Wk21 Hr0 Seg1.mp3" - the "week" section changes each week, but the rest of the filename remains the same.

With the new options, you can set an importer to Import "Only files that contain a valid Media ID", set it to skip the first 14 characters from the filename, strip non-numeric characters, and finally add an offset - for example +5000. This means that the first file is converted from "CCWeekly Wk21 Hr0 Seg1.mp3" to "Hr0 Seg1" then to "01", then imported into 5000+01=5001. The second file is 5002 and so on. The second hour of the show "CCWeekly Wk21 Hr1 Seg1.mp3" goes to "11" then in turn to 5011.

A full explanation of the new options is below.

When using the "Only files that contain a valid Media ID Number:" option:

• You can now specify a number of characters to ignore at the start of a filename - e.g. skipping the first 3 characters from "D9-1000" will import into Media Item 1000.
• The filename "Prefix" and "Suffix" filters now also apply to this option.
• You can now "strip non-numeric characters from the filename" - for example "ABC123-45.wav" becomes "12345".
• You can now add (or subtract) an offset - e.g. if the filename is "MyFile123.wav" you can add 1000 to it to end up with Media ID 1123.

Overrides:

• There is a new Tab on the Settings window that allows you to set many of the fields to specific values - for example you might want to force a specific title, or route the item to a specific category, or even just set the Extro to a specific time so items are always the same length.

Other changes:

• There is button next to the countdown to start an immediate check for files to import.
• You can now open the Media Browser from the new 'Media' menu.

The following issues have been fixed:

Importing files starting with a Media Id:

• The AutoImporter would exit if a file did not have any numbers in the filename.
• Importing Transport files would fail if the destination Media Item was already in use.
• The Progress bar when importing a file could sometimes contain a blank section.

v5.9.18107 17th April 2018

New Features/Changes: