How does CCU's system of distributing music on hard drives work?

[Dan.Strassberg]

Ever since I read the posting about CCU stations receiving music
updates on external hard drives, I've been wondering about the
details. As someone says every few seconds these days, "the devil is
in the details," and the details of this system as I imagine it seem
way too complicated for most radio stations to implement successfully.
Which means that I haven't figured out the system correctly, I guess.

I gather that periodically (every few days? every week? every two
weeks? every month?) some central facility (San Antonio?) sends
updated external HDDs to each station that runs one of these formats.
I presume that the shipments are made by FedEx or UPS because the USPS
is not sufficiently reliable, but I could be wrong. Am I? Do the
recipient stations immediately back up the added material from the
newly received external drive onto a local drive? Or do they
substitute the newly received drive for the drive they had been using?
Either way, when is it appropriate to cut over to the drive that
contains the newly received material? During a news break? During a
long stop set?

If the various music tracks on the local HDD are combined with VTed
liners and spots to form complete programs, how does the VTed material
reach the station? I gather that satellite links are not used in this
system. Are land lines used? Private Web feeds, maybe? I can imagine
that if the audio bandwith on the VTed portions was not as good as the
audio quality on the HDD material, there could be no noticeable
consequences and that maybe not even one listener in 10,000 might
notice.

But what happens if an HDD shipment to one or more stations is
delayed? If the person doing the VTing (especially if the VTed
material goes to multiple stations) doesn't realize that s/he is
announcing a new music track that has not yet reached all of the
stations, there would appear to be a problem. And if Web streams are
adequate for delivering the VTed material, would they not also be
adequate for delivering the music--even if the audio quality was not
quite equal to what you can achieve on a HDD--especially if the
encoding on the HDD uses lossless compression or no compression.

-----
Dan Strassberg (dan.strassberg@att.net)
eFax 1-707-215-6367