[thelist] [OT?] Mp3 Scheduler for Radio Station?

[Simon Batistoni]

> Does anyone know of a program to [easily] schedule mp3 files according to
> times?

First post here for what must be at least 8 months, and I'm afraid it's not
good news.

Having trawled the net extensively for something which does exactly this
only 3 weeks ago, I'm afraid I couldn't find anything which wasn't horribly
unreliable, or horribly expensive.

Commercial radio automation systems start at £10,000 ($15,000), which
doesn't quite fit your average "no budget" outfit.

The trouble is that, even with the advent of "mom amd pop" style online-only
stations, this is still a small, specialist market, so there's not an
abundance of shareware/open-source effort going into it.

The main problem you get into is succesfully mixing tracks together for
seamless breaks, which has to be done (unless you are lucky enough to be on
Win2k) by some fairly serious data-splicing, to mix the audio *before* it
hits the soundcard (since, pre-2k, one soundcard can deal with only one
waveform source at a time).

Just scheduling MP3 tracks one after another sounds *really* horrible
because you will often get serious dead air. Doing this would be relatively
trivial in most programming languages you choose to name, but not really
suitable for broadcast.

What are they doing at present?


Sorry to pour cold water. On the other hand, if anyone else finds anything,
I would be *very* keen to know about it.

Simon Batistoni
userfrenzy