Good morning Djs and Music Programmers, welcome to this quick update on the Pro Radio Sidekick plugin!
As you may already know, SideKick is the new plugin that takes care of storing youor radio history, creating charts automatically, and displaying songs widgets on your website.
After receiving so many requests from our users we are here with a great udpate that introduces 2 major features related to the song history.
New Feature 1 – Skip artwork import
Some radios had a disk space issue because of a huge programming, which was causing hundreds of artworks to be imported in the media library.
While there are multiple ways to manage this, for instance offloading medias on external CDNs, we wanted to provde a quick built-in functionality.
In the SideKick settings, you can now use the checkbox “Use external artwork url”
When selected, the songs stored in the database will not produce a media attachment for the artwork, saving space.
Impact on the functionality:
While this feature won’t affect directly the SideKick Songs Widget in Elementor, which will simply display artworks from the remote iTunes location, it will affect the charts generation. In fact, songs from Sidekick can be imported with artwork in the charts, but in order to display each artwork, it must be imported in the media library. If the media import is disabled, charts will be generated without artworks.
The workaround is, for each song, to select the title and click on the auto suggest, to fetch the artwork live, and import only the ones you actually need for your chart.
New Feature 2 – Titles exclusion
Many radios can have jingles, ad breaks or other shows names in the current radio song that shouldn’t be imported in the songs history or in the songs library.
Now you can exclude such titles in order to forget about unwanted entries in the history.
In the Sidekick options you will find a text area “Exclude titles”.
Just enter a string per line, to recognize the titles that shouldn’t be treated as songs and should not be imported or displayed. For instance, if you radio has some jingles named
- Jingle 1
- Jingle Radio
- Another Jingle
You can simply enter “Jingle” (without quotes) to exclude any of the above mentioned strings from being imported.
More info about Song History
For more information please check the official documentation of sidekick at this link.
Pro Radio SideKick comes included for free with Pro Radio, in freemium version: you can use it with some limitations. To unlock the full potential of this powerful plugin, you can get the premium version here.
Other updates in Pro Radio 6.1.1
Another great improvement was added to Pro Radio Core plugin version 6.3.3.
This plugin introduces a fix for the new Google Fonts format, which requires to click a button to have your fonts functionality fully restored.
If you experience issues on your website fonts please try those steps:
- Make sure top update website and plugins (with the proper button Update Plugins from Pro Radio Admin)
- Click Settings > Kirki
- Click “Clear Cache”
And voilà, that’s it, fonts are now fixed!
My Support and Updates period expired, what can I do?
No worries! Contact us and we will help you with the reactivation!
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