Before I kick off my questions, I would like to say I’m impressed with what I’ve read on the software, and its hardware control functionality too. I’m not a newbie to broadcasting, and have been working in professional broadcasting as an IT Broadcast Engineer, party in community radio also, for 11yrs now. One of the many things I’ve done in the last 36 yrs of my life So I’m very technically minded, and had a lot of experience with a wide range of software, and deployment environments.
Righty here we go.
Licensing. I would prefer to answer this question via email, but couldn’t find any contact details.
Pending a test using the trail version, I’m looking to use mairlist in a small internet project. I’m considering the Home Studio Edition as an affordable way to get started. Project is a small internet station, and even though I would prefer to use the Professional Version for its features, my budget is tight at this stage. So is it ok to use the Home Studio Edition licence to get things up and running?
When I do upgrade to Professional, will it automatically port the database created under Home Studio Edition, to a network accessible Professional Edition?
I read that it support Live Feeds on line inputs in scheduling. Does that mean the software will un-mute the Line-In at a scheduled time, then mute it at the end of that scheduled window?
Generally, as long as you only use the software for yourself and not for profit, you can use the Home Edition and upgrade later. I know that there is some sort of “grey area” for some people who get started with a new project - so to get a definitve answer, you should contact me at tw@mairlist.com and we’ll discuss that in private.
mAirList 5 has a built-in “clone database” tool that converts to and from any supported mAirListDB backend, e.g. from SQlite (local) to PostgreSQL (network). That makes the conversion pretty easy. And it’s also a great tool to export a “snapshot” of your inhouse networked DB to a local DB on a USB stick. Think outside broadcasting.
There’s more than one way to accomplish this:
“Mute/unmute mixer input” actions affect the Windows mixer - this is the traditional way to route a line-in to line-out, but it actually depends on the abilities of your soundcard, and I’m not sure if it works well on modern Windows versions. (The Windows mixer has been abandoned since Vista imho, I think applications can still use the interface, but it might not work properly with modern cards and drivers.)
Then there is the “Live Feed” items which can be added to the playlist (and database!) like any other playlist item. When “playing” such an item, mAirList will record the audio signal from the specified sound card input and play it on the sound card assigned to the player. So it’s not just unmuting, but actually recording and instant playback. This will involve a little bit of latency depending on the buffer settings. But as the audio goes through the application, it will work for any combination of inputs and outputs, even across ASIO/WASAPI/DirectSound.
You will find two “Live Feed” items in the “Add” menu: “Live Feed” and “Live Feed (infinite)”. The former lets you enter a duration after which the item will “end”, and playback will skip to the next item. The latter just plays “forever”, until an event or another item with a fixed time kicks in. (For internet streams, “Stream” and “Stream (infinite)” work in the same way.)
If you want to use a Live Feed in an event, I suggest you start with an empty playlist. add the Live Feed item and adjust its settings as required, then save the playlist in .mlp format (right-click, “This Playlist -> Save”). Then in the event scheduler, use “Load and play playlist” action.
If you use mAirListDB scheduling, you can add the Live Feed items to the Library (click the small arrow next to the Add button in the Library toolbar), then use “Specific item” within the templates.
Sounds great. I’ll email you regarding my particular licensing question.
I take it there is guides online for getting started with mairlist?
I noticed there isn’t much in the way of video guides. But I’m thinking about creating some basic video walk throughs, as I learn my way around mairlist. I use to work for an eLearning company back in the early 2000’s, so creating guides and courses is something I have experience in. I often write simple how to’s, including a recent one I did on how to create a Studio Screen/Kiosk Screen for a radio studio using a Raspberry Pi. This is one I built for a local community radio station: http://instagram.com/p/tnnO-Th6eg/?modal=true
Hey Matt,
sorry for going off topic,
Your Studioscreen looks great. I know how to setup the Kiosk on Raspberry Pi or similar (I guess this is a webbrowser) but never found a real comfortable way to fill it with content.
Can you point me to a guide to do that?
Thank you for the welcome. Its great to be here. I’m hoping to be a useful contributor to the community, as well as getting stuck in with this great bit of software.
Well the Studio Screen content is actually a hidden, IP restricted section of the website and uses the Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework to be responsive.
I’m putting together a guide for the Kiosk side of it, but the actual page itself is all hand coded, running off of (and I’m going to get technical here) an MVC based Object Oriented PHP framework I developed over the last 3 years. The framework runs sites I look after, as it also includes an integrated multi-user CMS. Currently powers http://unity101.org, http://djbook.co, http://extradry.tv and some other projects.
The Twitter timeline is something I built separately, and might set that up as a separate service, as it is already used by a few organisation already.
The previous played tracks is another add-on I’ve built into my framework, and is used to push track information to the Studio Screen and Unity 101’s website, as well as updating TuneIn’s website in real time via their api.
So I’m very technically minded, and had a lot of experience with a wide range of software, and deployment environments.