Radio Station Automation Software

Regarding No. 3, the audiofile descriptions, I would add

--  AAC support;

--  CBR and VBR (Constant Bit Rate & Variable Bit Rate) mp3.

ALSO, maybe this would be No. 11...

--  Plugin support.

Oh: should this run on windows, Linux, or Mac?  Personally, I'm a Mac or Linux guy, but there's more than me out there.

see, software I can do, and I just cannot find the perfect solution for less than 400 bucks. 

Maybe a version 1 has which parts?

Oh: should this run on windows, Linux, or Mac?  Personally, I'm a Mac or Linux guy, but there's more than me out there.

see, software I can do, and I just cannot find the perfect solution for less than 400 bucks. 

Maybe a version 1 has which parts?

I understand that your needs are different from mine, but I find it hard to agree with points 8 and 9. Having a robot read the news and weather would rob me of that "local voice" that makes Part 15 radio unique. I would much rather hear a human performance than the same voice that does NOAA weather. But again, your criteria is unique to your needs.

I don't know of a self-contained system that can do all that, but I'm a Rivendell user and am quite satisfied. Its running under CentOS Linux on a $135 HP computer and can do most of what you suggest (except for 8 & 9). I dont use the built-in streaming as I prefer to run the computer output through a mixer to add other sources (mics, CDs), and if I want to stream, do it through a separate computer; otherwise, its just an automated playlist nailed up to the Internet and  spontaneous localism is lost.

My own list would include robust performance, decent crash/power loss recovery, and intuitive operation. All the rest of your suggestions are valid.

I totally agree that items 8 and 9 are not critical.  Maybe we can get this list down to 5 or 6 items to start.

I do like the rivendell project; very slick.  I was thinking of something like Zara with streaming, and few other things.  

As for my personal reasons for the NOAA reader - there may be times when a human is not around to read the weather or in the event of a local emergency, a human isn't always available to announce that.. maybe an ERS is more important than NOAA though..

1) Multiple Playlist Handling 

2) Scheduling

3) Builtin support for at least ogg, flac, and mp3 - AAC, CBR, VBR

4) Builtin support for multiple audio outputs

5) Builtin support for Streaming Media output (to a shoutcast or icecast server)

6) Live assist

7) Basic hotkey mapping to standard USB devices (2nd keyboard remapped, etc)

8) Automatic crash recovery - maybe save state every so often, if the system crashes, it should pick back up gracefully.

Something to say about computer platforms......

I do not do what I say do, but I am sincere when I suggest using Linux or MAC if you can.

I am on Windows XP, but deeply resent so many things about the Microsoft experience, and wish I had the time and opportunity to learn another way.

My starting platforms were Commodore C64 and then the Amiga. which was so wonderful, but guess who screwed it all up? No name calling.

I grew up with the Atari 800/XL/XE and ST's - so Yeah.. I totally agree.  

Maybe make this Linux since I have more experience with this, and it is free.

Full disclosure here - I used to work for Microsoft.  But then, I used to work for a lot of companies writing a lot of software, on UNIX, mainframes, etc.

That being said, Windows 2000 is an excellent platform - robust, fast and most software still runs on it (at least, most of the Part 15 software of interest).

Everything from Windows XP on was a compromise, and I really, really dislike Windows 7 and above (you can't even run an unsigned driver on Windows 7, unless you totally open up the security).

And I always approach open source software very cautiously.  The moment I added Icecast, an open source streaming server, to my Windows 2000 platform, it became a lot more unstable (prior to that, it had run for months at a time).  It all depends on the software, of course (and who is working on it), but too many eyes can sometimes spoil things (testing is a particular challenge for open source software).

There are many variants of LINUX (saying that you should run it is like saying you should drive a car) - some good, some not so much.  And, imho, entering the Apple world is not much different than Microsoft's.  They're even more proprietary and closed, particularly on the hardware side.  On the software side, you should make sure that what you want to run on Apple will indeed run (a lot of applications only run on Windows).  Choosing Apple over Microsoft is a preference, in my view, nothing else.

The argument of running LINUX on an old computer is getting, well, old, considering that you can purchase modern, new computers these days cheaply that scream compared to the old ones.  Why you would spend time getting a $100 or so old computer chugging along (and almost as much time keeping it chugging) when you can go out onto e-bay and purchase a new one (or almost new one) for easily under $200 is beyond me.  I'm currently running my station on an ASUS EEE Box dual core that I picked up on e-bay cheaply (it is running Windows XP Professional, it came with XP home and I upgraded it).

Bottom line, you'll probably be a lot more restricted or have to put a lot more work into getting a LINUX/Apple solution working.  If you stick with Microsoft Windows 2000, XP (not the home version) or even Vista (if you have a more modern box), then you'll be fine, you'll have a lot more choice for software, and you'll spend a lot less time messing about on the computer (but if you want or like to do that, fine, all the more power to you).

[As a sidenote, I started off on Vista hating it, seems to be a fad, but have ended up preferring it for my general purpose computer.  You'll need lots of memory and disk space, and a reasonably fast processor - when it first came out, it dwarfed a lot of the available computers, hence it got its bad name, and a lot of software didn't run on it (that has been corrected, for the most part - even Zara Free Edition runs on it nicely)]

Station Playlist!

I will agree Win2K has been good. Right up until about 3 months ago, we still had it on a dozen machines at my day job (also radio related), but phased it out. Extended Support of the platform was turned off by MS three years ago this month, and it didnt make sense to keep "feeding the baby" when he was all grown up and out the door.  That, and try finding a clean copy of 2K + SPs these days.

 Rather than to bolster the argument of keeping old computers alive, the mention of my $135 CentOS/Rivendell computer was to point out that one can buy a functional and recent 64-bit used/refurbed machine for dirt; keeping in line with MLR's suggestion that $400 be the upper limit of affordablity.  When I read unhappy buyer's comments on the Tiger Direct "barebones" or "CPU/Mobo Combo" pages, it's hard for me to get fully behind most new, ultra-low-priced components. I'll turn down anything older than a 2008 model PC, as long as the CPU can still boogie at top speed and the electrolytic caps have clean tops, Im OK with it.

To my own way of thinking, a large choice of software wasn't relevant in my choosing an audio management ("automation") system. I treat that particular computer as a closed-purpose system --- audio playback and storage only --- so all non-essential programs are either turned off or removed. There are no Internet browsers or torrent programs on it, nor Skype, IM, auto-upgrades, nor whatever. This is a single-purpose device, the way a turntable is designed for playing records and not on which to throw clay pottery. To that end, the OS itself is not relevant.

I really don't "resent" any OS in general. Hell, put a 1973 Bowmar Brain calculator in front of me and I'll do a radio show with it. I went with Linux and Rivendell because, 1) I know the guy who wrote it, 2) the "appliance DVD" it comes on makes installation effortless, 3) it doesn't need a reboot for months at a time, 4) it's performance has been proven in use by a lot of college and religious broadcasters and at least three radio networks based in the Washington DC area, and 5) once you know what you're doing, it sounds really good.

You can run ZaraRadio in Linux. I done this using Ubuntu.

1. Install Linux Wine.

2. Install Windows Media player using Wine using the Win XP settings. (I think I used version 9 for the media player)

3. Install ZaraRadio using Wine.

Do the audio settings in Wine and your racing.

Works no problem.

I think it must be a matter of personal experiences.  To see how hard it would be to stand up automation on linux, windows, and mac - I tried them all.

Windows and Linux PC: Old Dell Optiplex 745 with 4GB RAM, and a second sound card.

Linux: I grabbed Rivendell, installed it, followed the user manual (application, NOT OS), and had it running in about 15 minutes after the initial OS install.  Everything just worked.  There was no fuss with soundcard IO weirdnesses, devices were all recognized, everything went swimmingly.

Windows: I tried a few different things. 

First - SAM.  This worked pretty much out of the box, there was a little tinkering with sound, and trying to get the right bitrates, then the right processing stuff so it didn't sound like butt on the air.  But yeah - pretty easy, maybe 15 minutes.

Next - Zara.  Again, fast, clean install, easy config, since I had already done the sound card tinkering with SAM, it was a matter of recalling what I had done prior and doing it again.  The weather addon slowed this little box down a lot, so I turned that off.  Yet another 15 minutes from start to on the air.

MacOS - The mac I used is an older i7 with a 128gb SSD and 8GB ram and a diamond external sound "card" I picked up at the company store.

MegaSeg - So, reading a previous poster who said something to the effect of it being difficult to run automation on a mac.. what were you trying to do?  This was the fastest of all.  In fact, this may be what I settle on.  The longest part of this was downloading. not really, it was under a minute to download, but seriously.. within 10 minutes (and thats cause I had to transfer audio over) I was on the air and rocking out with both audio cards.

I want to try more Mac stuff - anyone know others?

Overall: It is what you like, what you are used to, and how much effort you want to put in to it.  I will say this: With commodity (not cheap, 50-80$) sound cards - Windows apps (all of them that I tried) gave me popping and pauses when I put headphones/audition on a different sound card than the primary IO.  One app I didn't mention here, but I tried across all 3 platforms was Mixxx - Its not really automation.  But that was the exception to the popping sound.  It worked really great across all the platforms.

IDJC was a linux one I didn't include in this roundup.. it was just a total pig on this system.  Maybe I will try later on a big beefy box, but seriously - its just a media player with streaming and it bogged my little optiplex down to nearly unusable.

 UPDATE: RadioDJ was super easy to get going - the real issue on that one was downloading and installing .NET 3.5 and installing the MySQL DB - I think if I do this one, I will put the mysql db on a linux box and connect out to it, this way the audio processing won't compete with the evil non-tuned sql queries that always come with small-shop software.  I think I'm going to dig into this one deeper.

Johny, how can one get Windows Media Player 9 in the clear, without having to download all the other Microsoft baggage?

I use RadioBoss. Fits the bill.