In the past few years, I’ve become more interested in the technical side of radio. No, I don’t want to be an engineer, but I’ve become interested in how radio automation systems work, and from a listener’s standpoint, what’s necessary or not. I’ll be comparing two systems today, both of which can be downloaded free of charge, to see how they compare to even budget systems such as Station Playlist. I have used both of these systems to do the radio work I do, but that work consists of at most two one-hour radio shows per week, which are recorded and sent to stations well ahead of airtime.
Winamp
Among my blind friends who want to do radio work but don’t have Station Playlist, Winamp is the most popular option. Although it was out of development for a number of years, I hear it’s actively being maintained again. I switched to it for my shows last summer, and while it’s got its glitches, once you get used to how it operates, it’s pretty easy to use. This is actually a media player first, though there is a plugin that allows it to stream to a Shoutcast server. To me, the target market for Winamp as a radio automation system is the hobby broadcaster who may have a Shoutcast server already set up, but has no intention of broadcasting to it 24 hours a day. The reason I say this is that there is no way, at least natively, to play multiple playlists back to back, something that would need to be done if you are running 24/7. I suppose you could continue to update your playlist, but this would be a time-consuming task, and as there’s no scheduler, this is probably not ideal.
Zara Radio
I have to give Jake at Global Community Radio a shout out for introducing me to this system. Zara is a neat little program that is really easy to use and has a few more features that a radio station would actually use. While there is no scheduler like you’d see in a system like Station Playlist, Zara does have an event system that can be used for things that need to run at a certain time. This is pretty easy to set up, and unlike Winamp, means you can schedule your station down to the hour or even minute. The system also allows you to program elements in a rotation or sequence, so all you have to do is let the system do the work if that’s how you want to run your station. This is pretty much what all the big systems do anyway, but the drawback to Zara is that you cannot see what’s coming up next. Supposedly the paid version does allow you to see the name of the file being played next while the free version only tells you what playlist element is coming up next, but what you really need to be competitive with the big systems is to see your entire hour. In order to get an experience similar to that of your larger systems, you would again need to hand build playlists. In theory, there should be a way to build playlists based on what’s in the rotations you set up, but I can’t figure out how to automate that process. Once those playlists are built and timed events are set up, Zara can run for a long time. If you are not planning to host your station, you probably don’t even need to set up playlists, just set up your rotations, a master playlist, and any timed events and you’re good to go until anything needs updating.
Zara makes it harder to host your station. In addition to having to hand build your playlists to make sure you know what’s coming up, you need to keep an eye on what has played when, because in the free version of Zara, only one voice track can be assigned to a song, so you would have to monitor which songs have played in order to change out the tracks. For a station with a wide playlist, this may only need to be done once a week or every couple of days, but a station with a tighter playlist would need to have this done more often. I suppose the other option would be to build time into the playlist for hosts to speak a couple times an hour, but I personally am not a fan of that kind of radio. It seems like there should be a way to automate the track changing process, but I haven’t figured out how to make that work either.
In short, there are quite a few challenges to overcome, many of which I have tried to address but was ultimately unsuccessful. Still, I think that if you want to run a station that sounds like the big commercial stations you hear, Zara is your better option, I just wish I could tell you how to address some of the issues you are going to face.
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