Feed Loader - Setting it Up

MIXER uses a mechanism called Feed Loader to communicate with a radio station and collect now-playing data. We use that data for two things:

1. Displaying the artist and song title in the audio player
2. Associating the songs and artists with the incoming song ratings, powering MIXER's patented music research aggregation.

To make it work, we'll share a private folder through Google Drive, and ask you to point a copy of now-playing XML to the local copy of that folder. Google's Drive for Desktop will update the cloud-based copy of the folder, and we'll then use the Google API to call MIXER every time the file is updated.

In the XML file, it's very important that we receive:

1. Artist name
2. Song title
3. Start time of the song
4. Duration of the song
5. We also need to be able to distinguish a song from a commercial or promo, so let us know the category tag you use to distinguish songs/music from commercials. We can accept multiple categories for music, so if you use more than one, let us know.

**It's very important that you let us know if you make changes to your categories that identify songs in your now-playing data.

Here are the steps:

1. Provide us an email address to which we can share a Google folder. You may choose to create a new, free gmail account for this purpose, such as "stationfeedloader@gmail.com", or similar. 
2. Look for an invitation to that email address from feedloader@mightyloud.com. That invitation will grant you access to a shared folder.
3. If you don't already have Google Drive for Desktop, please install it on whichever machine will store the now-playing XML file. It can be downloaded here.
4. After you've installed it, open a web browser, and navigate to https://drive.google.com/.
5. Login using the email address you shared with us. 
6. On the left, click "Shared with Me."
7. Find the folder we shared, which is typically the station call letters. Double-click it to open it.
8. At the top of your screen, you'll see "Shared with Me > [Call Letters]".
9. Click the small drop-down arrow next to the call letters.
10. Select "Organize", and then select "Add shortcut."
11. On the modal that opens, choose the tab that says "All locations," and then choose "My Drive." This will add a copy to your locally synched Drive for Desktop. 
12. In your automation, point a copy of your now-playing XML to that folder. It's important that the filename of your XML be your call letters only (lower case), plus the .xml extension. So, for example, wkrp.xml.