This is something I've been interested in for some time. I've had visions of taking a battery operated transmitter, such as the Whole House 3 and using it remotely with a phone.
However, this kind of app doesn't appear to exist at the moment; if anyone has information to the contrary, let me know.
I've found an app called BroadcastMySelf (or BroadcastSelf), and it allows you to do a remote broadcast to an Internet stream (either IceCast or ShoutCast), both through a microphone and playing tracks located on a smartphone. It has a neat, mixer like interface. But it's manual only, with no automated scheduling. And I didn't see a way to output to the headphone jack.
There are various automation programs available, some complex, some simple, that can allow you to fire off apps and do things on your smartphone based on events. However, the event lists tend to be pretty general, and not applicable to broadcasting. I did do a simple automation on my phone, playing tracks from 3 random directories at various times of the day. However, the rules were not straight forward (hacked is a better word), and you can't do even some of the simple things Zara can do because the events just don't exist in the apps.
Sure, you could just go portable with a Windows laptop running Zara or Salamandra, but that really doesn't accomplish the spirit of real portability that I wanted. You can't fit a laptop into your pocket.
Not really what I was looking for. I want a standalone, automation system on Android. The one you linked to requires a desktop automation package as well.
@richpowers you see how expensive it is! Convert it to USD or CAN$ from Euros and see!
@artisan-radio Yeah, I've looked everywhere before for an android automation similar to Zara and found nothing - which is actually kind of surprising.
@richpowers A phone to run an automated broadcast program similar to Salamandra for example wouldn't have the power.
You would need a minimum of 128 GB storage, a processor at least on par with a Celeron processor that basic laptops come with and a few GB of RAM. It would have to accommodate 1000s of songs, OTR's and other shows. And be able via USB/SSD drives to be transferred to the phone. And no phone contract as you couldn't have the phone operating at the same time.
If it could be done, much as I hate phones, I'd do it for convenience if an automated program for broadcasting including event scheduling was available for Android and the phone would operate it without costing 3 times as much as a computer!
@richpowers Not so surprising nothing for Android like Salamandra but it's not considered that a phone would be used for that purpose and the phone has to have to power to run it and the storage for 1000s+ of things.
Phones are the only things that use Android OP system. Oh yes tablets do to and they have the power to run it but like you saw, there is no Salamandra like programs for Android.
We should suggest it to the developers.
@artisan-radio A small Windows tablet would do it and it's sort of portable. They come with similar processors and storage that laptops do depending on how much you want to spend. Still a bit big for a jacket pocket though.
@mark Music automation is generally not memory intensive, there are Android player apps that provide a certain degree of automation. One I've played with is "Offline Music Player: Play MP3" and a very similar one called "Music Player & MP3 player" both can play most any format (not just mp3) and you can create multiple playlist and manage files but that's about it. I have no doubt a phone could handle a basic type automation program LIKE Salamandra or Zara. I wasn't suggesting you could run Salamandra on a cell phone.
All that's really lacking from the above mentioned is some scheduling, ability to import in, time announcements, etc
I would of thought some club DJ or something would have come up with such an app by now. That's how Zara began, a program for in-house businesses.
Somewhere there's an interesting story behind ZaraRadio but I can't seem to find it now, I know it's named stems from Zaragoza, Spain, but can't find the story, seems someone had brought it up here like 20 years ago.. speaking of which,we can look back at Zara's site 20 years ago : https://web.archive.org/web/20051025082954/http://zararadio.com/
They show a long list of stations using it back then, in Spain of course, but also Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chili, Italy... Just about every where but the US and Canada...
But I guess that all has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
A smartphone could easily run an automation program. And as for memory, current (and even previous) smartphones have 8-12GB of RAM and a minimum of 256GB storage. Plus some allow you to have micro SD cards that can hold up to 2TB of data (mine unfortunately only has 1.5TB - all those songs!).
Apparently, there are Windows emulators available that can allow you to run specific Windows apps under Android. I'm somewhat reluctant about those, given my experiences with Docker (Linux emulation under Windows) but I'll give them a look.
There is also an open source project that allows you to install Windows directly onto a smartphone that has the appropriate hardware (Snapdragon 845 & above), at least supposedly. I don't know much about this, and apparently there are problems with drivers (camera, etc.). I'll also look into that, as I have a couple of spare phones lying around.
The third alternative is to write a quick and dirty program to do the automation. I've been reluctant to wade into phone development until now, as I'm most familiar with the C programming language, and don't like IDE's. Maybe I can find some tools and libraries that will make the job easier with C (I believe C++ is the standard for Android). While I can use that language as well, I don't like it, and anyway, the earliest C++ compilers (and maybe the latest as well) were just a layer over top of C, doing source substitution before compiling the resulting C code.
I wasn't aware of the emulation being available, never mind actually being able to install Windows natively on a phone. That's one of the problems in the computer industry (and life in general I guess) - you don't always know what you don't know. Those who claim to be experts in pretty much everything are just fooling themselves.
Well, a little bit of research has honed down the emulation approach to one solution - Winlator.
It was developed for older Windows games, so apparently has decent performance, and will run both Windows 7 and Windows 10 apps (the latter a lot slower, however).
Since Salamandra will run on Windows 7, I will concentrate on getting it running. I don't expect it to work right away; that's not how these things go, based on prior experience. I'll report back likely in a couple of days.
@artisan-radio I know nothing about the effectiveness of trying the following, but have you looked into actually converting the Windows .exe to an Android .apk as described here?: https://www.softwarehubs.com/how-to-guide/apk-for-android.html