Region playout (or “regionalization”) is mAirList's ability to route audio content from special playlist items – Region Containers – to distict sound cards, so you can create broadcasts that are essentially the same (music), but use “regionalized” content at special times (jingles, news, advertising).

For example, when you have three FM regions, and all of them should have their own set of jingles, or different advertising, you can use Region Containers to the schedule the jingles.

A Region Container playlist items is handled just like any other playlist item; the DJ can just load and play it from any available player. Internally, multiple audio streams are played at the same time (one for each region) and routed to the associated audio output.

In this tutorial, we assume that you we have three FM regions that we are going to handle:

• Dortmund
• Bochum
• Essen

To enable region playout, open the configuration app, go to Regionalization, and enter the names of these three regions into the text field:

Restart the config app for the changes to be applied.

After you restarted the config app, go to the Audio Devices page and open the Default devices node. You will notice the small + sign next to the Default playback device entry. Click to expand that node, and you will find three new settings below it – one for each region:

This is where you select the audio outputs to be used for per-region (on air) output.

Under “Default PFL device”, you will find the three settings again – just select the sound cards to be used for the pre-listening of Region Containers.

If, for any reason, you wish to override the default region devices for any player, you can just expand the player playback device node and make the appropriate settings:

To understand how the audio routing works, it is important to note that only the Region Container output will be routed to these region devices; non-region items will continue to play on the ordinary playback devices. So you must use some external device (matrix mixer) to generate the appropriate submixes for each region, usually by combining one region output with the main output of your mixing console. A notable exception is mAirList's encoder which can handle the region submix itself (see the section on streaming below).

For other audio routings (e.g. when you are using a mixing console), you need an extra soundcard output for each region, and an external mixer (matrix mixer) to create the appropriate submix for each region.

mAirList's internal encoder, when fed directly from the players, has built-in region playout support, so you can create per-region Shoutcast/Icecast streams easily. See the section on streaming below.