Explained: Voice links being skipped and Yellow warning triangles showing on the Log

Introduction

In certain situations, Myriad may have to skip a voice link or a dry voice sweeper, and if this happens then the item will have a yellow warning triangle in the Log View:

If you hover over the yellow warning, this will give you the reason why it had to be skipped, and this is usually "No available player":

There are 3 main reasons this can happen:

1. A user had inadvertently left content in the players so there was only a limited number available for the Log to use.
2. Myriad was configured to have not enough players available
3. Myriad was configured to have enough players, but the log was restricted from using enough to fulfil the scheduled log's needs.

Users leaving players busy

This is not very common, but can happen. If a user has dropped an item into a player and set it playing, OR, set it playing, then paused it, then the scheduled Log will not be able to use that player. This is so that it does not cause users issues where they have deliberately placed an item ready to use as part of an on air segment.

This only affects Playing or Paused items - if the item is only "cued", and Myriad does not have enough free players, then the cued item will be ejected and the player used.

Resolution:

Make sure users understand not to leave items in players when they finish their shows. If a user has left items in a player, you may be able to remotely close them using Myriad Anywhere Pro as this allows you directly control the players in the On-Air studio.

Not enough players

This is by far the most common cause of this problem, and is caused by Myriad not having enough players configured in Media Engine Settings. For example, a user might only have 3 physical channels on their mixing desk, so has only allowed Myriad to have 3 players.

In a very busy segue with lots of short items, or for example a segue where the outgoing song has a long duration after the Extro point, then there might not be enough players to also play the sweeper or voice link over the intro of the incoming item.

For example. consider this sequence:

1. Song with 15 second tailout
2. Short 5 second Station Ident with 3 second extro tailout
3. Voice Link
4. Incoming song.

In this scenario, assume the song is player 1, the ident has been cued in player 2 and the incoming song into player 3. If there are only 3 players configured in Media Engine Settings, then there is no available played for the voice link to be played in until the station ident has completed, at which point the voicelink will be 3 or more seconds late from where it was supposed to be.

Myriad always cues the "primary" item first (i.e. the incoming song) and then the "secondary" item afterwards (i.e. the Voice link) - this is because the system is built to always play as much main content as possible, and to sacrifice the sweeper or voice link if and only if there are no available players.

Important: The same can occur even if there are a lot of players,  if the system administrator has configured to cue multiple items ahead into players. For example, if the Station Settings has been set to cue 3 items ahead into players, then there will almost never be players available for voice links even on a 4 or 5 player system.

Resolution:

To resolve this issue, you should allocate at least 1 more media player. This player does not need to have a dedicated sound device, in fact on smaller mixing desks, it's very common that players 3 and 4 will share the final "3rd" fader, so you get the best of both worlds:

Scheduled Log not allowed to use players

In this scenario, even though there are enough players available, the system administrator has inadvertently restricted which players are available resulting in there not being enough players available to honour the log sequence.

Using the same example as above, but this time on a 4 player system:

1. Song with 15 second tailout
2. Short 5 second Station Ident with 3 second extro tailout
3. Voice Link
4. Incoming song.

But this time, the system administrator has restricted which players can be used for content in Media Engine Settings in an attempt to always leave players 3 and 4 free for content played from the MediaWall or Favourites by the user:

In this scenario, Songs and Voice links can both only be played by players 1 and 2, and although Links are played out of player 3, then the first song will be in player 1, the incoming song in player 2, leaving no player available for the Voice link to use.

Resolution:

Make sure that voice links always have at least 2 players assigned, and ideally at least 1 that is very likely to always be available. So in the scenario above, we could leave Songs in players 1 and 2, but change Voice Links to use 3+4, and also change Link items to also use 3+4 to ensure that any voice links that are adjacent to Links will not have a problem.