Re: digital automation

[umar@wcrb.com (Rob Landry)]

Dib98@aol.com writes:

>Many problems with automation systems happen because stations try to make
>them do things that they were not designed to do or they think they can run
>with no supervision or maintenance.

Classical formats present some unusual challenges to automation systems
designed for rock or news/talk formats:

1) music playlists tend to be large (ours is just over 2,000 cuts);

2) while pop songs tend to be 3 - 5 minutes in length, classical cuts can
range from 3 minutes to more than an hour;

3) every piece of music needs an intro track and an outro track;

4) you generally can't repeat a piece in less than a week.

It's hard to keep an automated classical station synched to time, because
commercial loads can vary quite a bit from day to day.

To accomodate 2,000 cuts with an average length of eleven or twelve
minutes, we decided we needed at 80 GB of hard disk space.  Even that we
found cramped, so we recently upgraded to 108 GB.

Novell file servers start having problems when asked to deliver multiple
real-time audio streams from disk arrays that large.

Backup is also a problem; copying the whole music library to (or from) tape
takes several days.  That's still better than the 2 months it took to load
everything from CD, though.

We feed a second, separately programmed, station in another market through
90 miles of T-1 line.  That adds another dimension of complexity to our
installation.  A human operator can't reliably monitor more than one
station at a time, so if something evil happens on the other station it may
not get noticed for a while, particularly if something fairly subtle like
the "Mozart Block at Nine O'Clock" starting at 8:45.

T-1 lines do fail, and when they do, you're off the air for several hours
unless you can get somebody to spin CDs in a local studio.  If all your
commercials are on a hard disk in Boston at the other end of a dead T-1
line, you're screwed.

All these problems can be addressed, but they're not the sort of thing
anyone who manufactures automation systems has any experience with.
Anything you buy will have to have a lot of custom engineering put into it
before it will even come close to working.

Oh, and I haven't mentioned sales automation, database marketing, and
Internet connectivity, all of which have to be made to work together with
the broadcast automation.

It's been an interesting couple of years.


Rob Landry
umar@wcrb.com

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