Question regarding music sources on radio

TheBMG

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122080576#Comment_122080576

Newstalk facilities are stereo AFAIK for their streams but FM output is mono .

waynescales1

What’s a playout system?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122081941#Comment_122081941

Software that plays the music, liners, identification jingles, ads etc for radio stations. These days always off computer storage; previously they could command CD/NAB cart/minidisc libraries in some cases.

RCS Zetta is probably the market leader, at least with large/commercial stations. Radioman, Myriad, ENCO, PlayoutONE, SAM, Tunetracker and probably another thousand systems exist as rivals.

There is/was a domestic Irish system, Radiomation; I'm not sure who still uses it these days.

California Dreamer

Outside of RTE I have never heard of anybody else ever using Radioman.

Randomly met this guy about 10 years ago ago at an event and was talking Radio with him. Apparently he came up with the idea to add the Kit-Kat logo to radioman to signal a break.

As far as I know, KCLR is the last station in Ireland, using radiomation as a main play system

waynescales1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122081945#Comment_122081945

I see, I understood the OPs question to be more about the music library itself. I wondered about this, it sounds like they just have their own digital library of music (mp3s?) which they have to build themselves, either from promos or online purchases?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122082021#Comment_122082021

Yeah. It is often mp3, really should use something with less impact to sound quality but you will run out of storage using PCM eventually.

I am not aware of a music library sales company still going; the CD ones lasted to the mid 00s if not later - you'd get a crate of CDs and a catalogue book / excel sheet / simple Windows app to tell you which CD had what, and a CD or two every month with new tracks; all for an exorbitant fee but it was the only easy way to do it back then.

ford fiesta

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122078069#Comment_122078069

was this CD system used ?

I always wondered how RTE Radio played their back to back songs without a presenter/DJ, during the 6 weeks RTE strike in early 1992 - each night ending with Abba "Thank you for the music" ?

waynescales1

Digital downloads aren’t cheap. I wonder is the cost involved in building up a music library a contributing factor to why we keep hearing the same songs over and over on the radio.

Which has me wondering about a guy like John Creedon who plays some very obscure stuff. Is he getting a budget from RTE to go out and buy whatever music he wants.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122082111#Comment_122082111

Cost isn't a factor. Record it off Spotify if the label hasn't sent it in…

RTÉ has a huge physical and digital music library and for the rest, Creedon likely has his own.

waynescales1

Record it off Spotify? Are licenced radio stations playing music pirated from streaming services?

Glaceon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122082640#Comment_122082640

As long as they're paying royalties to the publishers, it probably doesn't really matter where they source it from.

waynescales1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122083003#Comment_122083003

Probably derailing the thread now but…

Unless the radio station receive a promo copy then the publisher is owed two payments, one for obtaining a copy of the music and second for their music being played on the radio. Do publishers/streaming services have agreements with radio stations allowing them to rip their music from a streaming service for play on the radio?

TheBMG

radio stations don’t rip music from streamers. Or if they do it’s highly irregular and very bad practise.

Record companies will email new music or make it available via download links etc. Usually linear wav files are available (although I’ve seen/heard many examples where a song has been upscaled from a lossy source).

More Music

Radioman is playout product from Jutel, based in Finland. Mostly state broadcasters that use it.

A poster (California Dreamer) mentioned a Kit-Kat logo in relation to RTE. This was a "Kit-Kat" sticker put on the key that was used to play the ad breaks on the Radioman hot key keyboard. "Have a break……. 😁" See photo below. Presume it was a pilot you met at the event that told you about that.

Radiomation is the name given to a playout product that was designed and coded in Roscommon. There was actaully a whole suite of products under the Radiomation banner - playout, automation, news, traffic, scheduling, accounts, wire services and so on. There was a Radiomation product in probably every commercial station in Ireland during the late 90's/2000's. It might be something small behind the scenes (FTP audio transfer etc.) in one station to the whole suite in another station. They did have customers further afield also. It's probably only in a handful of commercial stations now and also some community stations in Ireland. I understand they have mostly moved on to other radio products.

RCS Zetta has become the standard in Ireland, other systems are also in use.

waynescales1

The extra cost involved in storing WAVs doesn't seem like a good investment for a radio station, as 99% of their listeners would be unlikely to be able to tell the difference between a WAV and mp3, especially under the listening conditions of the average listener.

TheBMG

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122083737#Comment_122083737

very little cost these days and there’s good technical reasons for using wav files; especially these days when so much audio is going to get downsampled again when it’s streaming. Start with the highest possible quality to minimise deterioration further down (cascading audio formats)

More Music

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122083737#Comment_122083737

20 years ago I would have agreed, not now. Storage is cheap to buy and a few TB's of hard disk space should not even be a consideration for a radio station's cost. You want to store your source audio in the best possible quality.

You need to keep the encode/decode cycles down to a minimum in your transmission path. To many encode/decode cycles will introduce coding artifacts and degrade the audio. 44.1kHz/16bit/stereo wav (CD quality) or better should be used for library items that will be played long term (music, idents, jingles, ads etc.). A 4 minute song will use about 40MB. I was insistent on this 25 years ago. I allow lower sample rates and mono for short term disposable audio (voice reports, silly FX etc.).

bullpost

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122082107#Comment_122082107

I'm not sure as I was on the Network side of things, but pretty sure it must have been Hard-drives.

Think the company providing the application was (And I see RTE listed as a customer):

https://www.jutel.fi/about-us/

RINO87

More derailment....but this is an interesting thread!!

The "carts" used in the 80's/90's....were these some form of DAT or regular magnetic analogue tape, or a mix of both?!

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122085524#Comment_122085524

Analogue magnetic, mono or stereo with an additional track containing cue tones.

Loosely based on the same origin as the 8 track.

RINO87

Thanks! Was DAT ever widley adopted in broadcast?

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122085986#Comment_122085986

Production side yes, on air not really.

Ad copy would often be sent out from ad agencies by DAT.

ford fiesta

In the 90s, especially the late 90s, there were so many formats a professional radio station would have used for music / songs playouts:

reel to reel tapes,
NAB cart tapes,
CD,
CD cart (Atlantic 252 used these a lot),
vinyl (2FM dance DJs used vinyl up to early - mid 00s for their weekend shows),
mini-disc,
DAT,
computer playout.

I think RTE started using computer playout for advertisements in the early - mid 90s. Other stations (Atlantic 252) would have used computer playout for some music around this time, though not very common.

end of the road

VCR was used for automated programming by some pirates as well.

TheBMG

VCR also used for logging the output. Three machines, eight hour tape in each one!!

California Dreamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122085986#Comment_122085986

DAT was more popular with production houses. Although a certain pirate of the 90s got a good deal on a DAC machine from Harry Moore!

California Dreamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122087000#Comment_122087000

Worth pointing out that it was 4hr VCR tapes put on long play to get the 8 hours.

I remember a now certain RTE sports guy recording music onto VCR for the overnight service. So you were absolutely guaranteed to hear the same songs in the same order every couple of nights!

Losty Dublin

As far back as 1994, Kiss 103FM were seriously looking to use Radiomation. The chief issue stopping them was the cost of the PC's required, and the risk of losing tens of thousands at a raid.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122086934#Comment_122086934

TheBMG

Was on holidays to London many years ago and was lucky enough to get a tour of Capital who had started using a digital system for ads. Very primitive but effective.

Over here I saw RLO/Limerick 95 using computer playout (including music) as far back as 1993/4. They were using mp2 as a format IIRC.

Northernsound/Shannonside had Radiomation but only played out commercials, promos, stingers etc. Music was still on CD.

RTE had the Radioman system and also used that bizarre MO disc thingy .. all the disadvantages of Mini disc and CD without any of the benefits l.

Atlantic 252 tried going digital playout quite early on (Cartouche?) but went back to analogue until they installed RCS Master Control. I’m sure @Enda Caldwell would know the timeline.

L1011

MPEG 1 Layer 2 (mp2) being the ideal format for when you're using high bitrate (>256k) is an uncommon opinion for this sort of stuff, but a hill I'll die on. Use simpler compression and filtering, you have the bits to get the quality without it. Playback is lower latency too.

Seeing people use 320k MP3 or even stuff like high bitrate Opus is mad. The stuff you're trying to save has been filtered out already. Those codecs are designed for lower bitrate.

mp2 sounds terrible at low bitrates as we know from DABv1 but it was never meant to be used at low bitrates

MO discs in caddies are extremely hard to damage which was a selling point, but so are CDs in caddies. Minidisc providing the caddy and also incredible reuse potential did provide the best of both worlds and became extremely important in production and news, but rarely playout. Although exceptions existed.