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BSI Simian on Multiple stations...

E

edarmsttrong

Curious if anyone has had any success setting up Simian for 3 stations and 1 production room. The goal is to have all three stations audio directories backed up on the production machine, so it is hot swappable for a failed air machine. Using Second Copy only seems to be an option for 1 station and 1 production room. Am I overlooking something? Things are becoming very convoluted, and I'm not sure the additional network config options in the manual will let me use the production machine for a backup.

Any help is apprecitated.

Thanks!
 
We have a similar configuration with the additional complication that one station's studio is 20 miles away. Only one of the stations uses music on hard dive (the other two are satellite) we have that library on a portable hard drive as back-up.

Wasn't planned this way, we bought that station, and had to buy a new library from TM to replace the MPEG-2 library they were using on their ancient Windows 98 computers.

Don't believe Simian will run over a network. You can, of course, connect several Simian machines by a network, making it easy to ferry audio files from production to each air machine.

However, don't think Simian likes retrieving material directly off the network for playback. So, two options:

*Automatic back-up of the production computer (since commercial content changes rapidly);
*Portable H.D. for each air machine with the music library and Simian (configured for that machine). Most time-consuming aspect of reloading Simian is the configuration of trigger sets, hardware settings, liners and the schedule.

With Simian you can have unlimited copies of each program, but only one running at a time since they are keyed to an USB dongle. So if you have the music and particular Simian configuration saved on a portable hard drive, if that station's computer dies, you can hook-up the portable drive to another computer, configure the dongle driver to activate the program and you are back on--at least with music.

Then you can reload the current commercials from the production studio & reload the log, proof it for missing spots & go on as normal.

Would be ideal to have a separate, identical, computer for each station, including the audio card; all preloaded with music, liners and Simian. But that would be expensive.
 
Thanks for the advice. You have described the solution that I discussed with the boss yesterday.

Mirror the prod. machine to a 5th PC, and back up the music libraries on each air machine on a portable drive.

This is probably what we will go with.

Thanks again.
 
I can tell you from experience that Simian does not like playing out over the network. One of the stations I contract for has a part-timer who thinks he's a computer genius. I got a call a couple of weeks ago saying that all the events in Simian are red and it's not playing anything. He had moved all the audio files to an external drive on the production machine. In doing so, he refreshed the paths in Soundhound, but Simian did not like having to retrieve the files from the network. Moved all the audio back in the BSI/audio folder and it's happy now.

I had the system set up where the production machine would mirror the two Simian machines we have. This way, if we lose a hard drive, we don't lose our files.

Actually, Tom, it wouldn't be all that expensive to do what you want with backup machines. You can get a BSI recommended Dell machine from ebay for about $300. Keep that machine at the transmitter with your production machine backed up on a removable drive that goes home with you every night and you will be good to go should something happen at your studio site. If you have internet access at your transmitter sites, you can back up your spots at the transmitter site and not need the removeable drive.
 
True, and many stations have an extra computer they could "raid" in case of a failure--i.e., one normally used for e-mail and word processing.

The expense, for a true "plug and play" replacement, would be the cost of having the extra, installed, audio card in this computer. Although, allowing for some loss of functions, you could use an inexpensive card, such as an Echo Mia, in the emergency machine until you have time to take the station down & transfer the good card into the new air computer.
 
edarmsttrong said:
Curious if anyone has had any success setting up Simian for 3 stations and 1 production room. The goal is to have all three stations audio directories backed up on the production machine, so it is hot swappable for a failed air machine. Using Second Copy only seems to be an option for 1 station and 1 production room. Am I overlooking something? Things are becoming very convoluted, and I'm not sure the additional network config options in the manual will let me use the production machine for a backup.

Any help is apprecitated.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I'd say part of the problem is the "3 stations audio directories". Why not have all three stations hold identical audio? That way you eliminate the issue of keeping the 3 OA machines properly synched and any one can then go on-air for any other station.

Yes, there's the issue that Simian hates more than 5500 audio files but I've successfully run multiple stations on a common database with more than 6000 files without any problem. Just do the database rebuild on a daily basis (run overnight via macro).
 
You "can" run Simian over a network. If the network drops our for any reason and teh machine doesn't find the network drive you get dead air, any muted network content all teh sudden skips past the mute because the content is gone.

I even have Simian looking to the hard drive of another automation system. When it works it works great.

I have all the permanent files like music and liners resident on the Simian hard drive.
 
You can also have more than 5500 cuts in the .mdb.

I have had an mdb database with audio properties of 19,000 cuts.

Follow spec on the on air machines and keep their audio limited to local requirements.

Use second copy to create a copy of all 3 stations on the production machine.

On the production machine only, let soundhound scan all the folders and make a large .mdb.

Second Copy is a great program. I also use it to backup our production room audio and visual traffic database each night to a backup box. That program is great value for the money.
 
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