OAS Playout.......... - a potted history

Pt 1. A bit of a ramble

More or less why I wrote it - read on if you enjoy a laugh.... or skip to Pt 2 where it gets technical.

My interest in all things radio dates back a good few years, as some of these rather appalling photos will testify to - some early attempts at some sort of "studio", those with good eyesight may spot the complete lack of any sort of mixing equipment and the "mike stand" closely resembling a bit of string. We're in the dot-matrix printer era here..... this from an old Star LC10 still connected to my Pentium P266. Anyone know where u can get hold of printer ribbons for it these days??

Incidently, ImageFM (such as it was?) still continues under the banner of Image Communications, custodian of which is my long standing friend Sir. Jim of Hart who is currently building a "real" studio in his converted garage - you can read all about how it's going along with a load of other stuff by diving off there.

Much of this site is/was dedicated to the old Dragon computer and I'll bet we were one of the first people to be sampling and playing our jingles off an 8-bit micro. My brief foray into hardware yielded (amongst other things) the 8-bit sampling hardware I bolted onto my Dragon64, along with a custom ram disk block for needed to hold samples of any significant length. The precursor to OAS Playout was then a Dragon GUI (with mouse!) sampler system complete with echo and delay capabilities. It made use of just about every bit of memory on the Dragon with about 1K to spare. And we still used string for our mike stands.....

Much of our radio was influenced by early (and not so early) commercial radio and to a certain extent still is today. My words of wisdom on some of these (along with the odd sample) can be found on my local radio page.....

We also built a couple of mixers along the way - this last one (built out of the remnents of the one in the previous photo) I still use today for trials. The advent of MP3 as a common (CD quality) playback medium (forced me to upgrade my original 486DX2 anyway) and the whole sampling thing not being the CPU intensive process it was on my old Dragon opened up the possibiltiies of producing something I wish I could've done 15 years ago - forget all those tape decks we mucked around with trying to get decent quality jingles done however writing software for a living makes you less inclined to want to spend your spare time doing so. However after much threatening to do it I finally made a start last year.

please note the lack of string.

Pt. 2 OAS Playout

Before I started down the development route I had a trawl round the 'net & asked friends for suggestions on packages already out there - I tried a few and came away disappointed. I had a couple of things in mind, based mostly on my previous experience and what I'd like to have used in my younger days:

• must provide dual output capability - I couldn't see how you could manage with only one channel, not being able to pfl anything would be a major handicap. A couple of packages offered pfl on a second card but they weren't interchangable
• a 'fast' jingle loaded - I'm one of those bods who like's to shove jingles and sound 'bites' in randomly so I wanted a quick and easy way to load and play these
• an easy way to get the music and maintain it in the system, ID3 tag import that sort of thing - intrinsicly because I'm lazy and want to minimize the effort involved in cataloguing my audio.

Here's my original spec:

Overview
--------

I'm not proposing to develop an automated playout system - 
there seems to be enough of those around although once the basics are
in, it could probably lend itself to being enhanced - this is more a
manual system. It's also probably going to look a bit sparten to start
with - I'm not targetting the brightly coloured cd-look here -
functional is the end result. 

From a visual point of view, there should be 2 distinct playout panels,
each one independently coupled to a sound card (or possibly each o/p
from a sblive - it does get 2 device enumerations after all?). In the
middle is some kind of 'jingle jukebox' where you can very quickly pick
a jingle (or several) and play them out immediately.

All music/jingles to be held in a shareable database.

Playout Consoles
----------------

Each one allows 'n' tracks or jingles to be cued up ready for play. 
With no user intervention, hitting 'play' fires the lot out in sequence. 
But there will be buttons to override this - specifically kick another
track in the sequence off !now! and possibly some fade in/mix between
the two. 

Jingle Central
--------------

A sizeable bit of the display will list in some kind of straightforward
manner all the available jingles/snippets/soundbites etc. At any time,
you can highlight one or many, then fire them out in sequence or on a
keypress to any o/p channel. A controllable preset will automatically
drag the volume down of any track being played on the console for the
jingle to take precedence.

Database
--------

Might be a seperate program used to update this. Offers a quick an easy
way to bulk drop in a load of audio files (drag n drop typically) and
assign them a load of defaults. On the mp3 side, will pull out the name
'tag' info automatically. 

The key additional other data to be held with each file will be:

- preset volume level (a must)
- start time (avoiding any silence present at start)

space for such things as: end time, fade in/out but these are lending
themselves more towards automation - I figure in our use we will be
doing more of a 'hands-on' approach to linking stuff together.

jrb, 25/03/01

trial4, April 2001 - the jingle consoles are in, as is a lot of the key functionality by this point. Clearly I'm unsure about what's going to go in the middle at this point......

I had a couple of folk evaluating these early trials - me old mate jim who has done some studenty radio type stuff and who at the time was doing IT support for the GWR radio group - so he know's a thing or two I reckoned.... He was forever trying to play as many tracks simulateously out of one sound card, telling me to add colour and "make the buttons bigger, that way the jock's are less likely to arse it up". Some of the comments and suggestions he made came round again recently as I was setting up for the Hastings Rock trial - so cheers mate.

The other guy taking a look has done hospital radio in the past and more recently on the Hastings Rock RSL - he was the catalyst to get OAS Playout on the station so again, thanks simon!

Early June 2001 I managed to dislocate my knee, leaving me stuck on my butt for most of the summer. A positive spin from this was the amount of time I could devote to Playout - the Beta 2 release added a lot of subtle features that many people aren't aware of including the right mouse click menus, double click 'fast loading' and property dialogs. It also got left running a lot so many of the reliability issues were sorted out. I also worked the database front end further, adding support for ID3v2 tags c/o of the OpenSource ID3 tagging library. A pre-compiled copy of the tagging (as used with OAS Playout) is available on my main Software page.

(c)June 2002, OnAStickSoftware, mailto: playout@onasticksoftware.co.uk