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Count Plays in an Air Check

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How to Count How Many Times a Jingle or Ad Played in a Recording

The client booked nine spots between six and ten in the morning. The automation log says nine went out. The client asks for proof. Somebody has to open the air check and count — and an air check is four hours long, the spot is 20 seconds, and two of the plays were cut short by the news.

Counting plays by ear is slow and unreliable. Counting them from the automation log is fast but proves nothing, because the log records what was scheduled, not what came out of the transmitter. This guide shows the third way: search the recording itself for every spot and let the program count.

The play count table

Summary tab: rows are recordings, columns are spots, cells are play counts. The totals answer the question for the whole day.

Every cell is backed by a list. Switch to Occurrences and group it by fragment: under each spot you see each of its plays with the start and end time in the recording, the similarity in percent and whether the play was full or partial. That list is what you check by ear, export and send.

Step by step

1. Collect the spots. The files you gave to the automation system are the best clips: the complete spot, clean, in whatever format you have. Click Add fragments… or drop them all onto the left list. Give the fragments readable names: the names go into the table and the reports. Save them as a set (File → Save fragments as a set…) and next month you add the whole set in one click.
2. Add the recordings. Add records from folder… takes the logger's folder for the day with every hour file in it. MP3 at 64 or 128 kbps, WMA, Opus, FLAC or WAV, hour files or one 24-hour file, it does not matter; the match is by sound.
3. Press Find. Each recording is decoded once and all spots are checked together, on all processor cores. Finds appear as the search runs.
4. Read the Summary. Every spot in every hour, with totals per spot and per recording. Compare the column with the booking: nine ordered, nine found, done. Eight found: the next step tells you which one is missing.
5. Check the doubtful plays. In Occurrences sort by similarity. Plays at 80–100 % are clean. A play marked partial 0.0–12.4 s of a 20-second spot was cut off after twelve seconds: listen to it (click, then Play) and decide whether it counts. Mark a find as false and it leaves the counts and the exports; mark it confirmed to say you checked it.
6. Export. File → Export results to CSV… gives one line per play with the record, the spot, start, end, duration, similarity, the part of the spot that played and the level. Save HTML report… gives a ready-to-send page with the play count table and every play listed under its recording. (Both need a license; counting and checking are free.)

What counts as a play

The station and the client may disagree on this, so the program leaves the decision to you and gives you the tools:

• Full or partial. A play is full when the whole spot sounded, partial when only part of it did; the part is shown in seconds of the spot. The Show filter above the list switches between all, full only and partial only, and the Summary follows the filter.
• Similarity. A spot played under a presenter or through heavy processing still matches, with a lower percentage. The Similarity from box sets the floor; the counts update at once.
• Sensitivity. Strict, Normal and Sensitive set how far from the original a match may be. Switching re-filters the existing results without a new search. Below the current threshold the finds are not counted, but they stay visible in grey as possible (View → Show possible finds), so a short count is never a mystery.
• One place, one play. Two versions of a spot with the same bed, or three spots of one advertiser that end with the same tag, can all match the same 20 seconds. Settings → Only the best fragment in one place keeps the best match and drops the rest, so a single play is not counted three times.

From a count to a time

A count says the spot aired nine times. The client usually also wants to know when. Air-check loggers name their files by the hour they started, 2026-10-20_06-00.mp3 and the like, and Audio Scanner reads the start time from the name, so every play gets a real clock time next to its offset in the file. The HTML report then reads like an affidavit: spot, date and time, duration, similarity. How to set this up, and how to run it every day from the command line, is in Proof-of-Play Report for Radio Ads: Make One Yourself in 5 Minutes.

Not only ads

The same count works for anything that repeats in a long recording:

• Station imaging: how often did each sweeper, jingle and top-of-hour ID actually run.
• Syndicated shows and networks: did the affiliate carry the network spots and the show opener.
• Podcasts: how many episodes contain the old intro, the sponsor bed or the outro that needs replacing.
• Call recordings: how many calls contain the mandatory disclosure or the hold music; switch on Telephone band for 8 kHz audio.
• Music monitoring: how many times a track or a sample appears in a mix or a day of programme.

Repeat searches are quick: the fingerprints of scanned recordings are cached, so a new spot is checked against a whole archive without decoding it again.

New to the program? Start with how to find where an audio clip plays in a long recording.