What the rundown does not do yet

[robert-dean]

As of: 2026-08-05, when playback was first verified on air (Spotify playlist → Icecast).
Revised: 2026-08-08, when segments and the talk-over cue landed. Two of the four things this
file listed have been built since; what is left is below.

Playback is built and working: playlist → Rundown → signed track-shim URL → Liquidsoap
request.queue → mount, with Liquidsoap's on_track posting back which item actually started. The
list below is what was consciously left out of that pass. Do not assume any of it exists.

Persistence — BUILT, and not by this file's route

The running order is durable, because it stopped being the rundown's. deadair.station_lineup holds
it as one document of stateful items, written on a throttle by the director, and the rundown keeps
only what a restart is allowed to lose: each item's playable form, when it was handed over, and the
playhead. See docs/internals/director.md § "Who owns the running order".

What that bought is the thing this file called deferred: item ids survive a restart, so an app
that comes back recognises the record Liquidsoap is still producing instead of standing its clock
down over an id it has never seen.

The reason this file gave for not needing it still stands and is still worth keeping: the timing
here is positional rather than scheduled. A segment sits between two items of the running order,
and a talk-over cue is expressed against an item and evaluated inside radio.liq. Neither is a
time, so neither needed persistence — it arrived for ownership rather than for timing.

Still deferred: an as-run log the operator can trust, which is a different record from the running
order and outlives it.

No playhead corroboration

No parking, recall TTL, playhead corroboration or self-retirement timer. Here remainingMs is only
displayed, so a jumpy reading is cosmetic.

If anything ever schedules against the playhead IN THE APP, read v1's rundown.ts first. Its
two-reading anchoring rule was paid for with a track that got retired a few hundred ms after
starting.

Something does schedule against the playhead now, and it is worth understanding why it is not a
counter-example. A talk-over cue fires a set number of milliseconds into a record — but the elapsed
time is counted in radio.liq, reset inside the synchronous=true on_track hook, in the loop that
produces the audio. Nothing about it crosses a process boundary. That is the whole reason it is
accurate, and the reason v1's warning still stands for anything that tries the same thing from this
side: the app's reading is a couple of seconds stale, the decoder leads the listener by the encoder
and client buffers, and neither error is recoverable from here.

Breaks exist; the voice that would fill them does not

Built since this file was written. A lineup line can be a segment, the director commits a ready
one as an ordinary running-order item and skips anything else, the station plants its own idents, and
radio.liq can duck the bed under a segment cued against a record. The harbor mount is gone; the
voice comes off a second request.queue.

What is still missing is anything that WRITES or SPEAKS a break: every segment the station plays is a
file somebody recorded and dropped into an inbox. See dj-voice, which is the whole
of the remaining work and the seams it drops into.

Related

The one distinction the whole design rests on, and which any of the above has to respect: handing an
item to the player is not the same as it airing. Liquidsoap resolves and downloads the next request
while the previous one still plays, so treating "just handed over" as "now playing" puts the app a
full item ahead of the listener. Items move queue → served → airing, and only the player performs
the last step.

---

Moved from docs/todo/rundown.md. The file as it last stood: https://github.com/robert-dean/deadair/blob/71e431d45ce7b35a189c7d226832ec4a6247e9dc/docs/todo/rundown.md

[robert-dean]

Status check, 2026-09-22 (main at 23b983e)

Persistence was already built, and the "nothing writes or speaks a break" gap is now closed: talk, news, weather, story, almanac and welcome writers are in modules/director, rendered through modules/render. What is left is the as-run log an operator can trust, plus the playhead-corroboration warning, which is advice rather than a task. This could narrow to the as-run log or close.

[robert-dean]

Closing: persistence and the break writers are built, so the only item left is the as-run log, which moved to #449.