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Standard music file format?

lanceventa said:
There are way too many stations still running everything on Windows XP systems with no real plan if the computer or drive crashes.
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Admittedly, I do have a client whose stations are running on Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) which is somewhat better than 32-bit XP, but they have backup machines with the automation software pre-loaded and all of the libraries are mirrored on external drives so any downtime from a crash would be minimized.

And the master library for The Eighties Channel™, in addition to being on a drive in my PC, also has an external backup where any changes or additions are manually copied, plus a weekly automatic mirror to another external drive which takes place during my own routine system maintenance and personal backups, and a third backup on an external drive kept off-site and updated monthly.

But I agree that stations such as Lance describes are living on borrowed time. The cost to update the OS, increase HD capacity, and have external backups is fairly low these days. I probably spent less than $300 total on my backup drives, new.
 
radiofan2023 said:
Please post a link to the station.
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Thought most people knew this, but it's KVMR:

www.kvmr.org

KVMR Public Radio - KVMR Community Radio

KVMR community radio is 3 stations serving the Sierra foothills in Northern California. Music of the world. Voice of the community.
www.kvmr.org www.kvmr.org

There's also the HD-2 version with a translator, that is programmed by the "next generation":

KVMRx Off the Dial - KVMRx - Radio Off The Dial

KVMRx is an "off the dial" experimental music stream. KVMR has three stations serving the Sierra foothills in northern California.
kvmrx.org kvmrx.org

Dave B.
 
RadioGuy1864 said:
I believe you're located in the UK, correct? Is that even legal?
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I think there's probably something in Spotify's terms and conditions that preclude the music being used for broadcast, but I don't think the music licensing bodies care where the music comes from. Back in the old days, various companies used to sell HDDs full of clean songs based around a format (you could buy one with, say, a few thousand AC-format songs) and it was legal as long as you were paying the music rights when you broadcast the songs. Your "penalty" for putting Spotify to air would probably be your Spotify account getting banned if they found out, rather than PRS and PPL taking you to court.

That said, it's not a radio playout system, it's not designed to be one, and it's totally unsuited to the job - you can't schedule ads, you can't play imaging, you can't find clean edits (every few months, a small town station gets pulled up for playing songs with F-bombs or N-words, and more often than not they're playing the music off Spotify or YouTube). I believe the station I visited was using some other desktop media player to play in ads and imaging. It was a janky setup all round.
 
If anyone was to look at our Wide Orbit Central Server to find the files, you'll see nothing but WAV. It's because WO wants either mp2 or WAV files to ingest and sometimes, it is a bit picky about it. Most of the stuff isn't sourced from uncompressed. It's mp3 or YouTube videos.
 


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