First steps

This page takes a fresh installation to a station on air with a programme of its own. It assumes you have finished the installation and signed in.

1. Add music

Heron reads the music in HERON_MUSIC_DIR. New and changed files are picked up automatically and analyzed one by one. Follow them on the Tracks page.

To add music later:

• From the browser: open Buffer and drop files or whole folders.
• From the server: copy files into HERON_INCOMING_FOLDER (data/incoming).

Either way, new files wait in the buffer zone until you import them. There you can fix their tags and give them categories before they reach the library. See Library.

2. Go on air

Heron starts playing as soon as tracks are analyzed. With autofill on (the default), the queue manager keeps three tracks queued, picked by rotation. To hear it, the stream needs somewhere to go.

With the local test server

Start the Icecast server bundled with the stack:

docker compose --profile icecast up -d --wait

Then, in the web interface, open Outputs and add an Icecast output:

Field	Value
Host	icecast
Port	8000
Mount	/live
Password	hackme
Encoder profile	MP3 128k

Listen on http://localhost:8010/live.

With your own Icecast server

Add an output with your server’s host, port, mount point and source password instead. See Outputs.

3. Shape the programme

Without any programming, Heron rotates the whole library, least recently played first, with the default separation rules. To give your station its own sound:

1. Categories: create categories (for example Current, Recurrent, Gold, Jingles) and put tracks in them, from a track’s page or a selection on the Tracks page.
2. Clocks: build a clock from slots. Each slot calls a category: least recently played, at random, or weighted. The editor draws the hour as it will sound.
3. Schedule: pick a clock and paint it over the hours of the week.

Hours without a clock keep rotating the whole library. Check the result with a simulation of the next day in Selection log. See Rotation.

4. Fine-tune the sound

In Crossfade & loudness (admins), adjust the crossfade, the loudness target and the silence watchdog, with a live preview of the transition between the track on air and the next. See Playout.

5. Invite your team

In Users, create accounts with a role:

Role	Can
Viewer	See the station, change nothing
Operator	Run the station: queue, skip, FX, categories, clocks, schedule, restrictions
Admin	Also playout settings, outputs, the library’s organization, and users