Playout Systems on Linux

Look in most radio studios, you'll find some sort of playout system. It makes sense in this day in age - low cost overnight, voice tracking, less errors (usually). However, you will find most systems running on the Windows operating system.

There is a good reason for this: why force change. Windows isn't exactly unstable when doing this sort of job. Also, take it from me, developing audio apps to work cross-os is a pain the the ass. This is especially when you want to layer tracks or use more than one sound card.

STAR is in a bit of an unusual position for a radio station. We operate Linux boxes (namely Debian) with no copy of Windows in sight. So, with most playout systems on Windows, what do we make use of?

Well, until recently, it's been an in-house botch job. This has taught us one lesson, don't trust Javasound to do the job.

With Java written off, we have a number of options: Campcaster, Rivendell, Digiplay and a Windows system running on Wine.

Starting with Campcaster. This was the first option we tried with STAR but it proved to have a few too many issues for us. For one, it doesn't log tracks played in live assist mode. Oops, bit of a show stopper there for an online radio station. Secondly, the configuration options are a little too exposed. You don't want people tinkering with settings on a radio station!

Rivendell is the other big Linux option. It's certainly aimed at the pro end of the market supporting a full scheduler and powerful playout system. Possibly even a little too much for us. It was actually decided against for STAR for two reasons: the MySQL requirement (we use PostgreSQL and according to the ITS liason will never see MySQL on the server) and the work required to make the scheduler tick. We're a volunteer organisation with a high tunover (students only stay for 4 years) so any system requiring a lot of work is not an option.

Wine is the Windows compatability system for Linux. It brings the ability to run Windows programs to the Linux desktop. Great, you may think, for letting us use the playout systems on our computers. Not quite. I could only find two playout systems that worked on Wine: StationPlaylist and mAirList. Both seemed to work OK but the cost factor (for StationPlaylist) and stability (we're relying on a compatability layer here) wrote off this option.

Now for the last on the list: Digiplay. This is Warwick University's in house job (not written in Java though). It has the benefits of being simple to use and sporting a web interface (I'm not sure of the merits of this but oh well). However, there are a few issues. Sue (the automation part) seems to simply be random select at the moment and there is no mass importer (apparently RAW just rip off of CDs). The last issue could be fixed by adapting our in-house import script.

Well, the working Linux playout system seems not to exist, well not for a small vountary station. Every option seems to have some sort of serious issue, whether legal (Campcaster), complexity (Rivendell), missing features (Digiplay) or technical (Wine).

I don't really see the commercial software developers really taking Linux seriously. Let's be honest, it's not really a big issue for most in this market. However, we need to choose a system. So what did we choose:

Digiplay.

Ah well, we'd better get cracking on the scripts and fixes to make it do what we need.

EDIT: Clarified the Digiplay and Wine issues. We didn't run Digiplay on Wine.