Watch someone drive a live show and you notice how little they look at the screen. Attention is on the microphone, the phone line, the clock. The playout system should be operable without a hunt for a button.
The core set
- Spacebar — play/stop toggle.
- B — previous track.
- N — next track.
- P — pause.
- F1 — help window.
- Ctrl+Shift+F — full screen.
- Numpad 0-9 — fire jingles 1 to 10.
Note that spacebar is play/stop, with pause on a separate key. In a broadcast context these are genuinely different intentions: stop ends the item, pause holds it. Conflating them onto one key means an operator under pressure cannot be sure what will happen.
The numpad matters most
Ten jingles on the numeric keypad is the single highest-value shortcut in the set. A jingle is fired reactively — a caller says something funny, a goal goes in — and the difference between a keypress and finding a button on screen is the difference between landing the moment and missing it.
Customisation, restricted
Shortcuts can be reassigned, but only by a superuser. That restriction is sensible in a multi-operator station: shortcuts are muscle memory, and muscle memory is shared. One presenter remapping the spacebar affects everyone on that machine.
What is deliberately not a shortcut
Destructive operations. Clearing the playlist, clearing history and removing tracks all require a deliberate interaction.
The asymmetry is intentional: actions you take fifty times an hour should be one key, and actions that destroy something should be slower than muscle memory allows.