PlayoutONE Monitor and Automatic Startup: Keeping Your Station Running 24/7

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An internet radio station that requires someone to manually restart applications after a crash is not a 24/7 station — it is a station with aspirations. PlayoutONE Monitor is what turns the aspiration into reality. It watches your broadcast applications continuously and restarts anything that stops unexpectedly, without requiring your intervention.

Combined with properly configured Windows automatic startup, Monitor is the difference between a station that needs babysitting and one that genuinely runs itself around the clock.

This guide is part of the Complete Guide to Building a 24/7 Internet Radio Station with PlayoutONE.

What PlayoutONE Monitor Does

Monitor is a watchdog application — its sole purpose is to keep other applications running. It maintains a list of applications it is responsible for and checks their status continuously. When a watched application closes or crashes, Monitor detects the absence and restarts it.

For a broadcast station, the applications Monitor should watch are:

  • PlayoutONE — If the playout engine crashes, music stops. Monitor restarts it.
  • LiveStream — If the encoder crashes, the stream drops. Monitor restarts it.
  • AutoImport — If the library intake stops, new files are not processed. Monitor restarts it.
  • FileCopy — If file synchronisation stops, content deliveries back up. Monitor restarts it.

Monitor itself should be the last application standing. Configure it to start first and watch everything else.

Configuring Monitor: Ignition Settings

Open Monitor and configure its Ignition settings — Ignition is PlayoutONE Monitor’s startup and watchdog configuration system. It controls which applications Monitor launches at startup and which it restarts if they close or crash.

Add each broadcast application to Monitor’s Ignition list:

  1. In Monitor’s Ignition settings, add PlayoutONE as a watched application — browse to the PlayoutONE executable
  2. Configure Monitor to start the application with Monitor — so PlayoutONE launches automatically when Monitor starts
  3. Enable restart on close or crash — Monitor detects when PlayoutONE stops unexpectedly and relaunches it automatically
  4. Repeat for LiveStream, AutoImport, and FileCopy

Set a short restart delay (5–10 seconds) between detection and restart. An immediate restart sometimes fails if the previous process has not fully released its resources. A brief pause lets the system settle before Monitor launches a fresh instance.

Setting Up Windows Automatic Login

Monitor can only restart applications if Windows is running with a logged-in user session. If your PC reboots and sits at the login screen, Monitor cannot run — and therefore cannot restart anything.

Configure automatic login so the PC always returns to the desktop after a reboot:

  1. Press Windows + R and type netplwiz
  2. Press Enter to open the User Accounts dialog
  3. Select your user account
  4. Uncheck Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer
  5. Click Apply — enter your password when prompted to confirm
  6. Click OK

Test this by rebooting the PC. It should return to the Windows desktop automatically within 30–60 seconds, without pausing at the login screen.

Setting Up Automatic Startup with Task Scheduler

The Windows Startup folder is the obvious place to put applications you want to launch at login. For most uses it works fine, but for mission-critical broadcast applications, Windows Task Scheduler is more reliable — it gives you more control over timing, conditions, and failure handling.

Creating the Monitor Startup Task

  1. Open Task Scheduler (search for it in the Start menu)
  2. Click Create Task (not “Create Basic Task” — you need the full options)
  3. In the General tab:
    • Name: PlayoutONE Monitor Startup
    • Select Run whether user is logged in or not if available, or Run only when user is logged on
    • Check Run with highest privileges
  4. In the Triggers tab:
    • Click New → select At log on
    • Specific user: select your broadcast account
    • Add a delay of 30 seconds to allow Windows to fully initialise before Monitor launches
  5. In the Actions tab:
    • Click New → Action: Start a program
    • Browse to the Monitor executable
  6. In the Settings tab:
    • Enable If the task fails, restart every 1 minute, up to 3 times
    • Disable Stop the task if it runs longer than (Monitor should run indefinitely)
  7. Click OK and enter your password to save the task

Now when the PC reboots: Windows starts → automatic login → Task Scheduler triggers → Monitor launches → Monitor starts PlayoutONE, LiveStream, AutoImport, and FileCopy. Your station is back on air within a couple of minutes of any reboot.

Testing the Full Startup Sequence

Before you consider your setup complete, test the entire recovery chain:

  1. With everything running normally, restart the PC
  2. Walk away. Do not touch the machine.
  3. After 3–5 minutes, check whether PlayoutONE is playing, LiveStream is connected, and your stream URL is broadcasting audio
  4. If everything is up, your automatic startup sequence is working

Then test Monitor’s recovery behaviour:

  1. Manually close LiveStream (as if it had crashed)
  2. Watch Monitor — it should detect the closure within a few seconds and restart LiveStream automatically
  3. Confirm the stream reconnects and audio continues

What Monitor Cannot Fix

Monitor is a software watchdog. It handles software crashes and application closures. It cannot fix:

  • Internet outages: If your connection drops, Monitor cannot restore it. LiveStream will reconnect when the connection returns (if you configured auto-reconnect), but Monitor cannot force the internet back up.
  • Windows audio driver crashes: If the audio subsystem crashes, restarting PlayoutONE may not help until the driver is also restarted or the system reboots.
  • Hardware failures: A failed hard drive, dead network card, or power supply failure is beyond Monitor’s scope.
  • Full system freezes: If Windows itself hangs or blue-screens, Monitor is also frozen. Only a reboot (manual or automated) recovers from this.

For these scenarios, a UPS battery backup (to prevent corrupt shutdowns from power loss) and periodic scheduled reboots are your safety net. A weekly scheduled reboot during low-audience overnight hours keeps the system fresh and clears any slow memory leaks or driver state issues that accumulate over time.

Setting Up Scheduled Reboots

Use Task Scheduler to create a weekly reboot task:

  1. Create a new task in Task Scheduler
  2. Trigger: Weekly, on a low-audience night (Monday at 3am, for example)
  3. Action: Start a program → shutdown.exe with arguments /r /t 60 (restart in 60 seconds)
  4. Confirm automatic login is configured — the machine will return to broadcast within a couple of minutes of the reboot completing

The 60-second delay in the shutdown command gives any active processes time to close cleanly. After the reboot, your automatic login and Task Scheduler startup sequence brings everything back online without intervention.

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