Radio Automation

[ChiefEngineer]

Yes, that's what we do. Works fine on the scheduler, but there's no way to assign those functions to a button so that the switcher can be manually operated. I've asked Ross about it, before.

If you are using a Broadcast Tools Audio Switcher; they offer a free program called Netswitch, which is a simple interface for manual switching. I agree that having function buttions within StationPlaylist would be the ideal way to do it; however, Netswitch will do basically the same thing until Ross adds the functionality. Come to think of it, if you own a different brand of switcher, you still might want to try using Netswitch with it.

I too, put my vote in for StationPlaylist. I spent a number of years as a support tech at one of the large system manufacturers and based on those experiences, I have to say that in it's class, SPL is one of the best systems I've worked with. I'm also amazed by the quality of the support. I've run it on my internet station for almost 2 years now. Since the station has a fast paced Top-40 presentation, I've asked a lot from it and it's delivered. Downtime has been minimal and typically due to aging computer hardware. I've also weighed in with Ross on the VoiceTracking functionality and he's led me to believe that improvements are on their radar. As far as using it on full power, commercial operations, especially stations running music on hard drive, it definitely can be a viable system.

How do you get Netswitch. My automation ahs a built in switch program but not suitable for all the uses of a 16 Matrix.

 

[Kent T]

We use BSI WaveCart for live assist, BSI Simian or Op-X at the larger company clusters. Reliable, well supported, runs fine on a wide variety of format needs. Have been playing around with ZaraRadio some at home.

 

[TomZ]

ZaraRadio easily fits into a College Radio environment. I introduced the students to Sarah (Zara = Sarah in Spain) as a windoze media player on steriods.... with another player sitting on the side that is used to interrupt the first player.

Drag & Drop functionality is a no brainer to a teenager.

It's an excellent tool for any engineer who might need to inject audio anywhere in the chain...

Load a few IDs, some sounders and even ads along with a few hours of music and the listeners might not even notice...

 

[Tom Wells]

ZaraRadio easily fits into a College Radio environment. I introduced the students to Sarah (Zara = Sarah in Spain) as a windoze media player on steriods.... with another player sitting on the side that is used to interrupt the first player.

Drag & Drop functionality is a no brainer to a teenager.

It's an excellent tool for any engineer who might need to inject audio anywhere in the chain...

Load a few IDs, some sounders and even ads along with a few hours of music and the listeners might not even notice...

Add fun drop-in elements on the bottom jingle bar, and you can party like it's 1965.
While they're available for play, you can also right click cue elements from directories in the lower left directoy box directly.

I also run windows media player in the background for bed sound, crickets during cold weather, beach during warn weather.
When file heads and tails are cut tight, a 1 sec crossover/1 second fade segue make it sound like there's super-caffienated board-op
with a great sense of rhythm. I have run months and months with Zara and Breakaway Broadcast on a laptop with NO burps.
Honestly can't remember the last reboot on the system now. Maybe 5 months? IE set offline on this, no updates.

I do notice that if I change what the next element will be, and then stop the playlilst, it will not remember the newly defined
"next" element, but upon resuming play, will go to the top of the playlist. Maybe just my rev. I can deal with one quirk.

But for free? Awesome. And I haven't even tried to use many features for streams, VT. etc.


For free, I am obligated to gush about how well it has worked. Other things have gone "ccm cruch" but never Zara or Breakaway Broadcast.

 

[chriscollins]

Still on Audiovault. I may have already posted that, since this thread is old.

The new version under 64 Bit Win 7 is nice... Thank G-D, that it runs with UAC and the works turned on.

 

[kthelen]

For free, I am obligated to gush about how well it has worked.

Speaking of gushing about free products, I'm surprised no one has mentioned Rivendell yet. There's absolutely a learning curve there for whoever installs/maintains it, so it's not for everybody - but once you get comfortable with it you'll never go back to anything else. If you're at all confident with Linux you can make a real go of it; and if you know pretty much any scripting language (Perl works well) you can whip up your own custom scripts to make it do anything.

That and Breakaway both get my whole-hearted thumbs up. I've got both products running on one AM and two (soon to be three) FMs with great success.

 

[Kmagrill]

Speaking of gushing about free products, I'm surprised no one has mentioned Rivendell yet. There's absolutely a learning curve there for whoever installs/maintains it, so it's not for everybody - but once you get comfortable with it you'll never go back to anything else. If you're at all confident with Linux you can make a real go of it; and if you know pretty much any scripting language (Perl works well) you can whip up your own custom scripts to make it do anything.

That and Breakaway both get my whole-hearted thumbs up. I've got both products running on one AM and two (soon to be three) FMs with great success.

Powerful as it may be, and it does appear to be quite powerful, formerly requiring the use of Audioscience cards for mp2 playout made it too expensive for many smaller stations, or to carry on a laptop. It would also have been nice if it had direct playback support for mp3 as well. Four years ago, we considered Rivendell for several of the LPFM stations here, but hardware costs combined with limited audio format support were deal killers for each of them. Since the product has continued to evolve and progress, it might well be worth another look sometime.

 

[ChiefOperator]

True about Rivendell. But as more and more stations move to PCM, the stations have choices other than Audioscience cards.

 

[ChiefOperator]

edit

 

[chriscollins]

True about Rivendell. But as more and more stations move to PCM, the stations have choices other than Audioscience cards.

I can't believe ANY station would still be using compression. That blows my mind.

 

[Kmagrill]

True about Rivendell. But as more and more stations move to PCM, the stations have choices other than Audioscience cards.

I can't believe ANY station would still be using compression. That blows my mind.

Sure there are. Lots of them, actually. It's a matter of cost. As an example, there's a small FM station here doing oldies. They have about 3,000 songs in regular rotation and an additional 10,000+ in low rotation or storage for occasional play. That would fit on a 2tb drive, uncompressed, with tons of room to spare, but it wouldn't fit very easily on a typical 250g laptop drive. Even if the library did fit, the main issue is the cost and effort involved to replace the compressed library with 15,000 brand new, uncompressed, songs.

Another example is an AM station here that has about 16,000 songs running in a Scott Studios SS32. All the music is in Scott's naitive 320k MP2 format.

Neither station uses a compressed STL and both stations sound quite good on the air. If the music is compressed at 256k or higher, there really aren't any significant audible effects, so what's the incentive for these stations to bear the expense of converting now?

 

[chriscollins]

Because when I squish that 256k MP3 down to a 32k AAC stream, it will sound more like crap than the wav does.

This is beyond broadcast. It makes my bit reduced streams sound much better.

 

[gtomas]

Why would you use laptop for radio automation, is beyond me. Even if it's a small station.

And even if they do, there are these little things called external hard drives These days, 1TB or 2TB external hard drive is not that difficult to find.


Regards,
Goran Tomas

 

[Kmagrill]

Why would you use laptop for radio automation, is beyond me. Even if it's a small station.

Nobody that I know in our market uses a laptop for playout, but I've seen this done several times at smaller stations. For really small stations, one reason is electricity cost. One LPFM, running the automation at the transmitter, says that they have cut more than $50/mo off of their electric bill by switching from a couple of 3gHz Dell desktops to 2gHz laptops. The station still sounds fine and the owners claim they've had no additional downtime, so it obviously worked. For them, saving $50/mo is between 10% and 20% of the total budget and the two computers were the biggest energy users in the plant. Also, it's very handy to have the automation installed on a laptop for emergencies.

And even if they do, there are these little things called external hard drives These days, 1TB or 2TB external hard drive is not that difficult to find.

True, but I wouldn't like to rely on an external drive being online 24/7. Even eSata drives can go missing under some conditions and good luck finding a laptop natively supporting anything beyond USB. If you have to load some sort of driver to get the external drive working, then it's something else that will eventually go wrong.

 

[bossbill]

And one would trust a laptop hard drive 24/7?

 

[Kmagrill]

And one would trust a laptop hard drive 24/7?

Probably no worse than a standard home HDD. I have one in my laptop that has been dunning more or less continuously since 2003. The main issue with an external HDD isn't failure rate. It's that the driver can malfunction and the drive becomes inaccessible.

 

[Ultanium]

Well I guess that I am the black sheep in the bunch, I'm running a laptop on air. It is an Itronix military-grade laptop that has a touchscreen & P4. Its running 24/7 with Windows 2k, Zara, & breakaway. I use an external USB drive for my library. It works like a champ!

 

[RadioMan203]

Back when I was running my Oldies webstream there was a 8 month period I was transitioning to new digs along with fighting with the local phone company trying to get data lines. I ended up loading StationPlaylist Pro on a laptop and it, the streaming computer, an Optimod 6200DAB and a DSL modem were stuffed in colleague's closet until I was able to get things straightened out.

Besides the low power draw of the laptop any short power interruption was taken care of with onboard battery power. Granted, all audio was encoded at 320k which may not be well suited for over-the-air broadcasting but I would think a good external USB 2 or USB 3 hard drive or RAID would suffice.

I think having automation on a portable device like a laptop is great since if a studio "soils the linen" you can move the laptop to another studio. Of course I'm talking about small market stations as major market facilities are going to have racks for their Enco, Prophet, etc systems.

 

[chriscollins]

Back when I was running my Oldies webstream there was a 8 month period I was transitioning to new digs along with fighting with the local phone company trying to get data lines. I ended up loading StationPlaylist Pro on a laptop and it, the streaming computer, an Optimod 6200DAB and a DSL modem were stuffed in colleague's closet until I was able to get things straightened out.

Besides the low power draw of the laptop any short power interruption was taken care of with onboard battery power. Granted, all audio was encoded at 320k which may not be well suited for over-the-air broadcasting but I would think a good external USB 2 or USB 3 hard drive or RAID would suffice.

I think having automation on a portable device like a laptop is great since if a studio "soils the linen" you can move the laptop to another studio. Of course I'm talking about small market stations as major market facilities are going to have racks for their Enco, Prophet, etc systems.

I have a backup Audiovault laptop that can run a studio if I need it to. I suppose I went the other way. I see a laptop as a backup. It uses onboard sound, so it's only for short term.

I keep my sound cards in my workstations, because I don't believe in or want an audio server to take down my stations. I have 2 Fileservers, but all they serve is files and the automation can fail over to either one in mid cut.

 

[Kent T]

For emergency and special event use, I do keep BSI WaveCart and BSI Stinger on a laptop. This same machine is outfitted with an M-Audio USB audio interface and Sony Sound Forge.