A few months ago I thought I would be able to get a radio automation system up and running. After some initial trouble with some bad CD burns I was able to order a CD from the nice folks at Ubuntu.
Campcaster was my first radio automation system of choice. There seemed to be plenty of support (including video tutorials) for setting up and running a station on Linux.
Before I list the problems I had with the program I just wan to say that I have about 15 years of radio experience and about 8 years with radio automation systems. I know what needs to happen at a station and with a station’s automation system.
Here is the list of issues I had with Campcaster automation:
- Lack of Control- There was very little way to control what was getting played out of the system. You can not stop airplay of something and get something else going.
- Scheduling- This is the main problem (for me) in the whole system. There is no integration within the software to bring in schedules (music, traffic) into the system. I was only able to find a 3rd party script that had to run through a command line. The only way to create a schedule for a day was to create a list of audio carts to play out in Campcaster’s web-based browser. This took quite a while on the playout machine. It is essential that 3rd party logs/schedules can get imported into the system.
- To build a log you have to start building the “Scratchpad” song by song. Once you have an hour in a “playlist” you must then schedule that playlist in a day. Then you need to load 24 playlists in a day, 7 days a week. With an average of 15 songs an hour, you can see how this solution would not work in my situation.
- Before a playlist could be scheduled it needed to be “locked”. This is just another step in a fairly repetitious and time-consuming process.
- Audio output- Once the “Studio” program was shut down the audio still played out in the system. There was no process visible on the Ubuntu system I was working on. This makes me feel a little nervous. I don’t like hearing things getting pumped through my PC without seeing any program doing it.
- Instability- After about 60 minutes there would be no audio coming out of the system. Since there was no program to look at there was no way to troubleshoot what went wrong. The playlist that was playing was over 60 minutes long (more like 90 minutes).
Although the promise of an easy-to-install open source Linux automation seems promising, Campcaster just doesn’t deliver.
The next program I will check out and review is “Rivendell” from Salem Radio Labs. This too is a open-source Linux automation system.