During network programming, act on subaudible cue tones. Sometimes the affiliate relays will let a little bit of a tone leak before acting, and you can use the

During network programming, act on subaudible cue tones. Sometimes the affiliate relays will let a little bit of a tone leak before acting, and you can use the same cue. If someone's driving the bus by hand, you'll definitely hear them. This will serve you well during football games to remove local commercials, at least, though increasingly local breaks come with a 120+ network avail before the tones fire and the affiliate takes over, so your training would still be useful. When you hear "after these words from your local station," watch for < 100 Hz tones. They're high amplitude and you won't be able to miss them; VU meters will often peg hard right during a tone, depending on the network. Should be a tone out and a tone in, and it is modulated so it'll be quite apparent. Another helpful avenue to explore would be in-stream RDS metadata, if you're working with typical FM. It lags a bit, but if you buffer a minute back or so you can look for transitions when the RDS data changes. Then you can use the same trick a delay uses to backfill its own buffer, and pad silences to restore your buffer. You don't care about dead air in your application, so you can be more aggressive than broadcast equipment can. (Talk radio runs >30sec behind, usually, and the "dump" button on a delay flushes the entire buffer, synchronizing air and program. It'll then slightly extend silences to get air "behind" program again. It has a little screen on it indicating how far back it is, and it's cool to watch it zoom back when people stop talking. If you hear a station dump delay, you'll notice they won't take callers for a couple minutes; this is why.[0]) Teach your setup to listen for EAS tones and you're well on the way to a startup of some kind. I think this was attempted in the past, actually... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay#Computerized_delay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_delay#Computerized_d...