• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

CD Players....

Excellent point Tom.Got that covered,too.can't have enough redundancy.got 2 of everything.(well almost ha,sorry bout that)
 
I was actually going to make a reply last night close to the earlier one. Really, in this day and age, I can see having A cd player in the building....we have two in the studio and never touch them. Ever. Waste, really.

We have a spare computer with a piece of freeware....it can actually play the BWF files off of our server...provided the on-air machine died but our dispatch server is running...we're good to go...

And in case something really hits the fan, all of our music is backed up, linear wav files on an external HD...and it's all backed up somewhere else, too. Imaging, too.

In a radio station, you should be buying more computers and fewer CD players. It's a far more reliable way to playback audio...even using winamp. EOS.
 
You make a very valid point there Sgeirk. PC hardware is very versatile when it comes to playing, processing and storing audio.

I guess what bugs me is that radio studios these days are looking less and less like radio studios. On-air consoles have shrunk due to computers having taken over many functions that were done on the desk, CD players and turntables have all but disappeared due to the computer, and other than a couple of mics for the talent and some monitors to listen to the program feed, little else is required.
Everything happens in a PC that's often mounted in a rack out of sight in the control room somewhere.

Sure, I don't ever want to go back to having to clean cart machine heads every 2 days, but soon we won't even need on-air consoles - it will all be done in a black box. It probably is now - but I haven't seen it.

A friend said to me a while back that radio is more of an IT domain than a broadcast domain and I have to agree with him!
 
Studio1 makes some great point there regarding the current state of broadcast studios.

In fact, I was finding things difficult when I started to build up studios for a high school radio project. I had one terrestrial engineer tell me I should just install a little Mackie mixer and call that "the studio." My goal was to make their station look AND operate like a real broadcast facility, so I beat the drum and got some donated broadcast gear (I even donated personal gear to the project). I'm beginning to wonder if the studio is going to look like something out of the 80's or 90's considering how much has moved to direct digital.

I'd love to have a couple of CD players in each studio, but since the main goal will be a webstream with ancillary Part 15 AM and FM stations within the building I can't chance it. Since DMCA rules say you must identify each track the CD player would be too tempting for the kids to bypass this rule ... of course this is assuming that today's kids even know what a CD player is! I see so many with iPods that I'd bet nobody has a CD player home except for the device built into their computer!

I think CD player still have a place in a studio. Some stations run request shows with them since it's often impossible to include every track in the MOHD system. Many still use them in production instead of loading all their production libraries into the system as well. Every once in awhile someone will send something in on CD, but it seems pretty rare these days. I still like 'em and I have a couple in my personal studio, but they don't see any action these days.
 
Although we do have a dual CD player in the on air studio, it seldom gets used. About the only time is when both of the control room computers must be switched off for some maintenance reason. I think that is fairly typical of today's radio reality.

Otherwise, the only place we use a CD player is our production room. In there, a Numark has served us well for over five years.
 
Same here. Production studio CD still gets a lot of use by some of our voice people who find it easier just to pop their production music in it and record the spot "on the fly." They are only in house one day a week & usually get dumped on by sales (could you just do a few more spots..?) so I make life easy for them.

Plus it's quicker on a CD player to hop through a stack of production beds to find the one you want. Our TM library is up to around disc 160 or so. And then there are those outside programs that get finicky and won't play nice with the CD-ROM but will play on a standard CD player.

Still keep a dj style dual CD in the control room for those times when I need to kill the air computer.
 
Chuck said:
Although we do have a dual CD player in the on air studio, it seldom gets used. About the only time is when both of the control room computers must be switched off for some maintenance reason. I think that is fairly typical of today's radio reality.

Otherwise, the only place we use a CD player is our production room. In there, a Numark has served us well for over five years.

Now I seem out of place here...because the majority of the DJ's at our station still play music off of CD (gotta love those Pioneer CMX3000's eh?).

From my perspective it's really all a matter of personal preference....
Correction: It's all a matter personal preference and how good your automation software is...
Correction: It's all a matter of personal preference, and if you're using a DECENT automation program (we're using 'SAM Audio Broadcaster'....because apparently if the software is good enough to use for an INTERNET radio station, it's perfectly fine to use for a terrestrial one.....no bueno...)

-Robb
 
IF you are live, playing music off CD's has the added bonus of keeping talent focused on doing their air shift, not 16,000 other things (since the automation will take care of the air...)
 
I have had good luck out of the drawer style Denon machines at one group and the Tascam CD-450 with the balanced output kit at another group. I did not like the the Marantz players. They just did not last. All three listed players had remote start and balanced outputs.

8)
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom