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Small station automation

RadeoEngineer said:
All they need to do is use it to play back prerecorded shows and run unattended overnights. The air staff is about 30-40 individuals that mostly bring in their own music and play back from CD's doing one or two hour shows once a week. There's always one person there during the day to do legal ID's and change the programs that are either on CD or flash cards right now. The station signs off at midnight because there's no one there, so the automation is mainly to allow them to go 24/7.
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Zararadio is all you need. The program is free and it runs and runs and runs. It has some nice features built in. One fantastic feature is that you can schedule events, such as the top of hour legal ID. The other nifty feature is that instead of generating and loading a playlist each day, you can make a very simple playlist of "Random Tracks."

I would make a playlist of 3 random tracks and then a station ID. Set the program to continuously repeat the playlist. I would also program the event scheduler to play the TOH legal ID once an hour. The program is nice because it won't cut off the track that is playing, and will wait for the track to end to play the legal. I would set the system up to keep running on auto pilot 24/7 and just have it come up on a fader on the console. This way whoever is the last person on the air at night, all they have to do is pot up the zararadio fader. The first person on in the morning simply just has to fade it down.

I can vouch for the program running non stop for very long periods of time. I use it as a backup audio feed. Perhaps 2 or 3 times a year I'll reset the computer just for good form. The program has never crashed on me. What the "Random Track" feature does is it will play songs in a directory/folder at random, but it will not repeat a track until all the files in the folder have been played, so you don't have to worry about it favoring certain files over others. The built in crossfade mechanism is decent, although you'll have to tweak it a bit to get it to work right for you.

From the facility you are describing, I seriously think you would be wasting money to buy something that you can get for free that will operate continuously with very little maintenance. Like Ron Popeil used to say, set it and forget it.

Another local college station does the same thing, but they use iTunes, and utilize its ability to fade the tracks together. Once again, I really can't see spending a ton of money for something simple.

Here is what I suggest http://www.zararadio.com/index.php?centro=main.php&lang=en The English version of the site. Good Luck!
 
A caveat:

Many automation programs, Zarradio included, will not work on a machine running Vista. If purchasing a new computer you can still downgrade to XP, for now.
 
I've been using Zararadio with my part 15 AM & FM. Easy learning curve & best of all - free. I downloaded the free add-on for the time announcements. I plan to make custom audio files with my own voice in Cool Edit for the hours & minutes. If that goes well then I will do same for temperature. Lots of fun from a hobby standpoint.
 
I have the demo of that software. It's fine if you want to play stuff. It's a pain to schedule without the scheduler. It will play continuosly but whine every 15 minutes to purchase. I may do that, just so to play my music with it to the radio overnights.


Powell
 
streamer said:
The UK Student Radio bods (similar to US College Radio) have a reasonably good list and some opinions. As ever, treat some with a grain of salt and is European biased but there are quite a few systems I hadn't heard off..

http://www.studentradio.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Choosing_a_playout_system
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Wow! That's a great link!

At this point I'm leaning toward Station Playlist. I appreciate the free programs but I want them to have something they can actually use seriously when the time comes for them to do that. There's also an issue of grant money having been set aside for a purchase so they have some restrictions on using the money or losing it.
 
If you have Linux knowledge, you could also look at Rivendell. It's a professional, quality program--and because its Linux, all software is free.

If you want a Windows program, I would probably choose Station Playlist as others have suggested.
 
RadeoEngineer said:
I volunteer for a legendary non com and I need suggestiions for PC based automation software. I'm only familiar with the bigger sytems such as Enco, Prophet, and others. What I need is something cheap and ultimately simple. For example, I just rebuilt their control room moving them from rotary pots to linear faders and I actually had people losing sleep over the change.

What is the easiest, most simple system out there?
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Without reading the other posts I'd highly recomend stationplaylist.com, its cheap, powerful, and very simple to use. I used it on 90sandnow.com and it was great.
 
I tried Zararadio. Very Basic, no voicetracking, if you need something that basic you might as go with winamp. But if your looking for the real deal on a budget go with stationplaylist. By the way it also supports RDS, and in the future if decide to use a commerical traffic scheduler, you can do that with this program. Plus if you have a suggestion for the program tech support will seriously look at it for a future update. Users have a newsgroup that will walk you thru any tech issues, and the program creator Ross is on the board EVERYDAY. Talk about great support. You won't be disappointed with stationplaylist..
 
At my station, we use OTS-DJ its about $350 and it's great! It allows you to set intro and outro points for the automation, it has a built in audio processor, scheduling, and it sets up in minutes!

http://www.otsdj.com
 
We're using mAirList http://www.mairlist.com for our projects - the basic layout is quite boring but the real power lies within the configuration as you can make it do pretty-much anything: send IP commands to other workstations (for remote splits), adjust the colours, layout and size of objects etc. We have ours looking like RCS Master Control but I've seen layouts to mimic EncoDAD, Rivendell, BCX/Captain Digital and others. Check out the user forum there for examples of layouts and tips as the basic one you get with the download is quite ugly.

Stationplaylist Studio is quite good for "set it and forget it" automation - fairly good with voicetracks and excellent with live now playing data. Enco was shown to us about 2yrs ago and whilst the big button feel would have made things easier for our newbies, we heard quite a few reports that it was clunky, liable to break and not so good at handling top-of-hour feeds without cutting-off the first 30s of a song.
 
Actually Enco is one of THE most capable systems made. Our SC ETV radio runs 8 stereo streams out of one box. It's NOT inexpensive however. We have it here at WKDK, and it does everything out of one box, and it's an older version. The newer versions are much better and a lot more capable. It's really not for a simple small station. Learning all of it can be daunting, but if you have to have a LOT of stuff done, it is one of the most stable ones out there.
But , if you have simple needs and a small budget, look elsewhere.

Powell an Enco user and lover.

BuzzRadio said:
Stationplaylist Studio is quite good for "set it and forget it" automation - fairly good with voicetracks and excellent with live now playing data. Enco was shown to us about 2yrs ago and whilst the big button feel would have made things easier for our newbies, we heard quite a few reports that it was clunky, liable to break and not so good at handling top-of-hour feeds without cutting-off the first 30s of a song.
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I agree that ENCO is not for the small station operation. The owner of a small station in East Tenn installed ENCO about two years ago on the advice of their engineer and they are still pulling their hair out. These folks aren't computer geeks so it's been kind of rough on them.
 
Don't forget about WireReady. Very inexpensive but powerful. I'm using their TV automation at work, and have their radio system running music elsewhere.
 
I think the Digital Jukebox is a good system. It can schedule music on its own and is compatible with most music and traffic systems if you need to go that route. The support is very good and they often run special deals to purchase the software from time to time (well under $1000).

K Fitz
 
RadeoEngineer said:
I volunteer for a legendary non com and I need suggestiions for PC based automation software. I'm only familiar with the bigger sytems such as Enco, Prophet, and others. What I need is something cheap and ultimately simple. For example, I just rebuilt their control room moving them from rotary pots to linear faders and I actually had people losing sleep over the change.

What is the easiest, most simple system out there?
Click to expand...

Zararadio. You want cheap and simple. it's free, and I figured it out in no time....
 
A group of radio tech types recently had a coffee break discussion about automation for budget applications, some of what had been covered in this thread. This is what a consensus of a handful of local radio guys had come up with:

BSI Simian: We've heard many curse the night with this as far as bugs and reliability go.

Campcaster: Linux based for those who are allergic to Mr Gates' operating system. Haven't heard of anybody using this system currently so no info on reliability.

Digilink: A little clunky interface wise and do you really want to pay $100/month for the rest of your life?

Digital Junkbox: While the DOS-version was pretty decent for what it was I found the Windoze version an absolute nightmare. Mediocre support did little to sell me on this. As the author of the original Radio World product evaluation I was shocked as it was the first time I was ever emailed by dissatisfied users of any product. Others have complained about lack of support and questionable business practices. Would not be likely to recommend this for mission critical operations.

Enco: Costs more than "budget priced" systems but can do quite a bit. Compatible with Content Depot for those who are NPR affiliates.

mAirlist: Free for non-commercial use. Has good feedback from people who have tested it but no long-term evaluations from local engineering community.

OtsDJ: Several stations have used this with success. Might not be too bad but only know of one station using this and I believe it may be just on overnights.

Prophet 101: Probably the best for between $1k to $2k price range. Flexible, reliable. Solid performer.

Radiologik: The only offering I've seen for Mac operating system. Nobody has any hands-on experience with it.

Raduga: Some have complained about the interface but is know for being pretty useful. Long track record and decent support make it worth considering.

Rivendell: Another system running on Linux platform. Paid support available if station staff needs handholding / support.

StationPlaylist Pro Suite: My personal fave as I wrote the Radio World evaluation. Reasonably priced for product and support. Online listserv support group is very useful. Good support.

WireReady: I know at least one non-comm using this and they rave about it. We assume it would be compatible with NPR's Content Depot.

ZaraRadio: You can't beat the price and many say it's feature rich.

Depending on budget I would personally opt for StationPlaylist for a low-end solution and Prophet 101 for an upper-end solution. Besides price you need to balance the need of support, and overall user friendliness.

Your milage may vary. void where prohibited. Opinions are just that.
 
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