Anyone know anything about BSI Simian

[SomeRadioGuy]

Stable? hardly.

it's the biggest pile of dung I've ever used. Clunky, fidgety, junky piece of crap that did the oddest things for no reason.

Several people at different stations with different versions agree with me.

It's not my most hated automation program.. that honor goes to The Phantom.

Ever thought that it was the platform you were trying to run it on and not the program? I've never had a problem with Simian when it's correctly installed/configured and run on a good upper-mid level PC. Try to run it on an under powered box, and you get what you got.

Thats possible, but I find it hard to believe multiple people had the same issues and it wasnt an underpowered box and not the software.

 

[Robert Bass]

Regarding SSD's, I hear they don't last nearly as long as a "spinning hard drive". I got a PC in 1998 that still had the original, fully working hard-drive when I removed the computer from service in 2012. I doubt an SSD would have lasted this long!

R

 

[PTBoardOp94]

SSDs last essentially forever if all you do is read data from them. They are fragile for read/write intensive tasks. Radio automation is mostly the former except for the daily logs, which could be put on a traditional hard disk if you like.

 

[level42]

I think I know who "SomeRadioGuy" is based on his dislike for The Phantom...haha.

I have gotten rid of Simian at all but 3 of my stations...I'm not a fan. Too many 5am Sunday morning calls to deal with some head-scratching software glitch for this contract engineer.

That being said, many stations I work for that had Simian were either using very old or pirated software with whatever random hardware they could scrounge up...so I can't lay all the blame on Simian itself.

I've converted most of the Simian users to Nexgen and long-term...they've been much happier with the results. Much less down time, infinitely better tech support, and a user interface that is much friendlier to people that didn't grow up in radio.

As for the Phantom, I still maintain about 12 of them...and they never crash, hiccup, need rebooting, or anything. They quietly sit there running their satellite formats, doing their job with no complaints. Clean the air filters once a month, and occasionally check the health of the hard drives. I've got one that ran continuously from about 1993 till just a few months ago, original hard drive and all. Had never had any sort of failure. Only reason I turned it off was that I had to move it to a new rack to make room for some satellite receivers.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

I think I know who "SomeRadioGuy" is based on his dislike for The Phantom...haha.

I have gotten rid of Simian at all but 3 of my stations...I'm not a fan. Too many 5am Sunday morning calls to deal with some head-scratching software glitch for this contract engineer.

That being said, many stations I work for that had Simian were either using very old or pirated software with whatever random hardware they could scrounge up...so I can't lay all the blame on Simian itself.

I've converted most of the Simian users to Nexgen and long-term...they've been much happier with the results. Much less down time, infinitely better tech support, and a user interface that is much friendlier to people that didn't grow up in radio.

As for the Phantom, I still maintain about 12 of them...and they never crash, hiccup, need rebooting, or anything. They quietly sit there running their satellite formats, doing their job with no complaints. Clean the air filters once a month, and occasionally check the health of the hard drives. I've got one that ran continuously from about 1993 till just a few months ago, original hard drive and all. Had never had any sort of failure. Only reason I turned it off was that I had to move it to a new rack to make room for some satellite receivers.

yeah, Chris... I'm exactly who you think I am

I've had 2 Phantoms crash on me horribly.. enough to take the station dead air/off air till I could figure it out

 

[boiseengineer]

Yes! The best reasons for using a SSD boot drive is speed.
A Windows 7 PC I have with a SSD boots in 25 seconds from power on to automatic login & program load.
Clone it to a spare SSD. Something eats the boot drive, you're back in business in no time.
The Intel "clone" program never worked for me. However, Ghost worked for a SATA disc to SSD clone.
I discovered that if I let Windows 7 see the new SSD drive before cloning the old drive the drivers for it are already loaded when I boot from the new SSD.

My experience is that Windows 7 will not let you schedule or try a defrag a SSD.
*YMMV*
Make sure you turn OFF any defrag program for that drive.
SSDs do not need it. BAD for it. Period. They have their own internal system of spreading the bits around.
Do not fill it up to 90% full. Lets the drive use each block less extending the lfe.
The Intel SSDs seem to get high marks for life span.

 

[Bengalsfan]

Thats possible, but I find it hard to believe multiple people had the same issues and it wasnt an underpowered box and not the software.

I don't. I've seen it happen before. Bad installs, wonky network setups and cheap hardware will do it every time.

 

[xmusicmatt]

SSDs last essentially forever if all you do is read data from them. They are fragile for read/write intensive tasks. Radio automation is mostly the former except for the daily logs, which could be put on a traditional hard disk if you like.

Yep - My web streaming PC is running an SSD for the encoder and Breakaway live.. since all it does is sit on my lan and encode audio out to the net -- felt like that was the best solution.. It had a 60+ up time on windows 7 before I did some security updates to windows.