Hey everyone. I'm looking to put some new software that's free on my station besides winamp. I want to put on some pre recorded ads for public events in my town. Anyone have any software that they thought was perfect?
You mean what software we prefer? I jokingly say that because opinions vary so much on this topic.
My personal choice I use as a workhorse in my studio is Sonicart 2.2. Don't get the old Sonicart 2.0 because it's buggy and lacks a lot of the new features the 2.2 version has. You can download it by searching around or if need be I can send you the software through email.
It includes a true radio automation virtual cart (unlimited carts) program, can play the first 10 carts directly by pressing an F1-F10 key, has an encoder program to encode music directly from CD to MP3s with title/song internet lookup, show producing software so you can setup adverts/promos/and airchecks to play at scheduled times.
It's one of those programs you really have to read through the instructions carefully through to be able to master how to use it. It took me a week of playing with it to figure out how to use everything properly.
Others will chime in with their favorites. I know of at least 5 station automation programs that pirates and professionals use but not many of them are free like Sonicart is.
Also I forgot to mention most automation software can do cross fading and song fade in/out automatically for you when playing a list, much better than Winamp can ever wish to do, and sound damn near like there's an actual DJ doing it. Using the appropriate software you can literally just walk out of the studio and go grab some fast food in the car and no one would ever know no one was in the studio. As cool as this is, the sad part is how many professional legal stations do just this today completely removing the "personality" behind the radio we used to know and love. Just a thought.
So true. I remember installing many of the first automation systems (reel to reel, cart decks, old click and bang relay controlled) in radio stations, old and new, and I knew exactly what was on the horizon. That was over 30 + years ago.
And now look at it.
Soon I will post some pictures of a place housing 5 studios for 5 stations all owned by the same idiot, and..well I will let the photos speak for themselves.
Peace!
K-ROCKS RadioOne
ZeroPointRadio
AM Stereo 1670
FM Stereo 92.1
I think the easiest one i've used is RadioBoss. I can program my news to play at selected times, make playlists very easy, and it tells you the time when a song is about to play. it's by djsoft.net. I got mine from a torrent so it was already cracked.
I just downloaded ZaraStudio after a year of using winamp and I like it, easy to setup and use, I'm still reading the manual to figure out the timed events and such but I think I have a winner here... sixer
Post by 105fmteesside on Jun 19, 2012 14:28:19 GMT -6
I've been looking for some decent automation software, at the moment I only use "A Random Music Player" which does the job but it only plays through my music folder, it doesn't play any jingles.
Zararadio as mentioned above is good. It's free, cross-fades, can shuffle the music, has the ability to program in jingles and events/ads etc. I like it anyway. Here's the link www.zarastudio.es/en/descargas.php
"Lets see' we're on err 92 FM tonight, and it feels like a nice clean little band so far. No one else is using it. The price is right."
Mark Hunter - Pump Up The Volume.
Alright anyone got any good ideas for Linux? I decided to dual boot my desktop so that I run Windows XP and Linux Mint 13 LTS (with all the fancy upgrades) and really enjoy using Linux as my main OS but all my automation software fails to run properly in Wine. The usual software I use is Sonicart and oddly it installs perfectly in Wine and all the accessory programs run okay but Sonicart.exe itself crashes
I downloaded XMMS and installed the crossfade, volume normalize, and a few other neat plugins but it really is no replacement for what I can run on Windows XP.
There has to be something for proper automation software out there for Linux? This really sucks if that is not the case as I am really enjoying not having to boot my dual partition for Windows XP unless absolutely necessary.
- ROSS - RadioBOSS - Shout! - Radiocube - Rivendell
No luck with any of those. RadioBOSS and Radiocube seem to be Windows only software. Shout! is web only software and cost money. ROSS only seems to lead me to dead links and Rivendell has become a nightmare. I had Rivendell working for a short while after taking an entire night fighting with getting it installed, but could not get it to produce sound even after going through it extensively, then to make matters worse the software just completely flaked out on me and won't even open now, not that it looked very promising to begin with.
I am about to the point to find something that is half decent made for Windows and run it in Wine but seeing as how Sonicart didn't run properly in wine I have little hope for other software.
The only thing I am really looking for is a program that will at least do automatic cross fading (hopefully at random), allow inserting or adding songs to the playlist on the fly, start/stop features and playlist saving/loading.
Well I now have a tolerable setup that gets the job done nicely...
Running a program called Rhythmbox which has a few neat plugins that can be added. One of the most useful I found called "Stop After" allows setting any song(s) to automatically pause before playing the next song in the queue (good for breaking in to talk), feature for normalizing volume levels of all music, automatic fade feature with selectable fade out time, and a few other cue/queue features to make it feel more like a digital cart machine.
XMMS which is a Winamp like clone also has some nice features that can be added like a volume normalizer, stereo spacial effect, EQing and so on.
My distribution is Linux Mint which has a really nice built in audio mixer panel that displays all the running programs playing music with a fader next to each one so I can do on-screen fading between Rhythmbox, XMMS, and any other running audio applications.
"Jack" or Jackd is a program I use that allows me to virtually re-route audio software to various sound cards or into other applications. Quite useful for the newer Linux distros that rely on PulseAudio which can be a pain in the ass for running various software made to cooperate with it and others that were made for ALSA or direct sound card access. It makes all software made for any linux distro play together nicely with the soundcard.
Still no luck with Rivendell. Think I may give up on it and the interface looks setup for complete automation which makes it messy to add songs on the fly or rearrange things in a show. Maybe others have had luck with it but I will skip.
So for now I have a workable station suite. Rhythmbox for basic music automation, XMMS for background music while talking on air, Jack to send live audio to one sound card for broadcast and "cue" monitor music to another, and KickWave which is Windows software that runs perfectly under WINE for a button board to play audio samples like sound effects, adverts, or IDs.
I will still keep my eye out for other software and give it a try and update this in the future for any linux users
Edit: One more REALLY COOL plugin I found for Rhythmbox is called rbpitch that allows the DJ to pitch up or down the music by a %, also allows temp and speed changing all live with whatever music is playing. This could be quite useful to give music a pitched up sound like rock stations used to do to give the show a more lively feel back in the day. Also can really screw with listeners if you put the settings far out of normal ranges