David Sharp said:
I remember when the Paxon stations (or maybe we had already been bought by Clear Channel) converted to Audio Vault. Absolutely terrible! I remember, they had practice sessions for the staff, so we could figure it out. Weeks later, we were still asking each other how to do stuff. I think all of us (and there were probably over a hundred staffers in the building) at one point or another entertained the thought of quitting because the software was so bad!
Most of the computer problems at Paxson were caused by the world's worst engineer, a fellow named "Jim", whose main talents were shrugging his shoulders and day-trading in his office. Then CC came in, recognized his "talents" and promoted him to Palm Beach. Last I heard, he was a big corporate "trainer" for them... Yeah.
The Audiovault installation at the Tampa Paxson stations was "borrowed" from Paxson's Miami cluster, and probably not paid for. This made support very problematic. In addition, we were using version 1.0 of the software; at the time, A/V was up to version 5 or 6.... There were also at least five separate software packages running simultaneously, none of them interfaced correctly. One for commercial audio, one for news audio, one for writing news, something else for sales, another for Internet (using "tubes"), and perhaps another system for production. Later there was also a Bloomberg terminal, also not interfaced properly. I remember once we were supposed to play a :15 promo spot for a 6pm TV newscast, which they fed Production at 5:15. It needed to play at 5:45, but at 5:43 I had to rush into the studio with a reel-to-reel tape, cue it up, and play it off that. The spot eventually found its way through the computer maze and showed up in the studio computer at 10:15pm!!! When the real ClearChannel (formerly Jacor) engineers took over at our station, they were incredulous that such crappy engineering would ever have taken place (and that the perpetrator would be allowed to escape unharmed).
AudioVault was capable of working nicely, IF the installation was done properly, with good hardware, and maintained. I found it impossible to get our A/V system to automate, and "Jim" waffled for months. The station kept going off the air (well, losing audio, anyway) overnight. After several sleepless weeks, I happened to be at the NAB convention in Orlando, and an AudioVault engineer there gave me his business card. Couple days later, I called him, e-mailed him some files, and he solved the problem in 10 minutes. No problem, but "Jim" was pissed because I hadn't gone through him (and probably the whole installation was illegal anyway...) All this made it a giant relief when we finally switched to Prophet (aka Profit) Systems about a year later.
One other anecdote: I once complained to "Jim" that the news-writing computer system crashed every half-hour or so, and had to be re-booted (often when you were on the air and it had all your copy on it). This was a lengthy process too. His response was that the darn news people typed too fast, and occasionally hit the wrong key on the keyboard, and those errors built up inside the computer until it couldn't handle them, and crashed. In an attempt at humor, I said, "Ahh, the errant keystroke buffer overload, eh?". He looked at me, chuckled, and said "Yep, that's it". Later I told that story to Paul and Manny, the ace IT guys at CC, and they laughed for weeks. It just summed it all up.
