Hosting a Session

The player page is where you run a live session. You need to be one of its hosts, which is set under Advanced Options on the session.

Starting and ending

Start Session and End Session are on the player page. End Session is what turns it into a recap — until you end it, nobody can play it back.

If you set the session to start or end automatically, you don't need either button, but both still work when the room runs long.

Ending itself is careful. A session set to end automatically waits for two things: its end time to have passed, and every host to have been away from the player page for five minutes. A session that runs over is not cut off, and refreshing your page or dropping off for a moment doesn't end it.

Driving playback

Whoever loads a track is in control of it. Load a track from the playlist and your play, pause, stop and seek are broadcast: everybody else's player follows yours, so the whole room is hearing the same thing at the same time.

Listeners can turn sync off to go at their own pace and back on to rejoin. That's their choice and nothing you need to manage.

Two things worth knowing before your first session:

• Some people's audio won't start on its own. Browsers block audio the listener didn't click for, so when you press play a few of them will hear nothing. They get a message with the fix, and Player Issues is the page to point them at. It isn't a problem with the session.
• Give people a moment between tracks. Feedback is pinned to the second it was written at, so somebody still typing about the last track is writing against the new one once you advance.

Changing the running order

You run the session from the player page — the Session Playlist button is only there for when you want to change something about the playlist itself. It opens in its own tab, and what it's for is reordering the tracks, taking one out, or adding a submission on somebody's behalf when they couldn't get it in. Drag the rows into the order you want and press Save.

Projected mode

For a session in a room, the TV button turns this browser into the screen at the front — the one on the wall that everybody is looking at. It shows the layout your group has drawn for a projected screen.

Drive the session from your own screen, not the projected one. A projected screen always follows — pressing play on it won't move the room.

Worth saying out loud at the start: anyone sitting in front of that screen can press In the room, and their own page stops trying to play the track at them.

The countdown

The clock button puts a countdown in front of everybody in the session: a quick timer of 1 to 15 minutes for a break or a vote, or a clock time to count to, with an optional line of your own above the numbers — "Back in", "Voting closes in". A layout without a Countdown panel shows it over the top of whatever is there, and Clear takes it away.

Before a session starts the countdown is to its start time, so if you're running late, 5 min later pushes it back and the room sees the new time instead of a timer that ran out.

The meeting

If the session has an external meeting link — Zoom, Meet, whatever you put on the session — the button to open it is on the same bar.

The built-in meeting isn't a link and has no button: it's part of the player page, and it opens when a host arrives there. Built-In Meetings covers running one — who the room puts on screen, what the recording does, and the habits that keep a room in step.

Managing the recap

The session becomes a recap for whoever its Recap Visibility allows. Each artist can then narrow that further for their own track, or delete it — Deleting and Leaving is what they see.

The rest is on one page: right click the session in Manage → Group Events and choose Manage Recap, which is there once the session has ended.

Session Replay is the video — a YouTube or Vimeo link, or the session's own recording if you used the built-in meeting. When there's a recording ready the page says so and offers Use the recording, which fills in the link and when track one started; check both against the video below the form before you save.

Getting the first track's timestamp right is the part that matters, because every other track's is worked out from it. The list underneath is what somebody playing the recap back is following, and clicking a time jumps the video there so you can check it. If one track is out — usually because it was restarted during the session — edit its time, and you're offered the choice of shifting everything after it by the same amount.

The two buttons above that list copy it or save it as a file, for pasting under a video you uploaded somewhere else. And from the sessions list, a host can send the Recap Available message to everybody who was there.