Interacting with Playout Playout offers many levels of interaction outside the basic package - be it from a listener standpoint providing track 'now playing' details, online requests and other web based capabilties to remote administration and control for station managers and presenters.

Web based updates - the "Track Lister" concept

With more and more internet only or 'net simulcasted radio stations coming to the fore, Playout provides dedicated support via optional plug-ins called track listers for providing information on "track now playing" information to the outside world. Any number of these modules may be loaded into Playout and each time it begins playback of a new track, each module is notified in turn of the new track details.

As standard, Playout ships with two modules - the first provides a simple mechanism for updating web page(s) with this information including a history of "last 10 tracks played". The second provides the capability of providing this information to ShoutCast servers. A ShoutCast server provides realtime MP3 streaming capabilities across the internet and the track details are then propogated out from the server to for display on client's players (eg. Winamp) and on the Shoucast web page itself.

The SDK shipped with Playout includes full details on how to go about adding further modules if desired.

Instant Listener Requests

Like many small scale stations, Hastings Rock automate throughout much of the night during their broadcast. This year, for the first time they will be offering the ability for listener's to make requests throughout the night and have them scheduled in automatically during the automation period by Playout. Listener's can search the Playout database via the web and request any available track for playback.

Logic inside Playout's automation sequener filters identical tracks & artists such that they do not occur too frequently and provides the ability to inject jingles and ad breaks in at given intervals throughout the automation period.

Here you can easily specify the track interval for jingles and ad breaks along with setting the minimum number of tracks that must be played before one by the same artist.

Remote administration and advanced deployment control

Playout's open database standard makes it very easy to interact with the system over the internet using existing - often free - software. Therefore you can upload music to your station, import it into Playout, generate and modify playlists in fact anything you can do with Playout and all from the comfort of your armchair.

Key to this is that the Playout database is implemented as an ODBC compliant database - which means in simplistic terms it communicates using an industry recognized standard and more importantly can be stored on any ODBC compliant database engine - of which there are many. "Out of the box", Playout utilises a Microsoft Access database - it's simply a file named 'audio' which you can open up and modify if you have a copy of Access installed.

Users and developers familiar with the Microsoft Access package can interact with the Playout database just as they would with any other Access database. Developer information is provided with OAS Playout explaining the structure and relationships of the database allowing for powerful queries & data transfers to be implemented - for example to move information from other systems, process the music logs, generate playlists & generate custom reports.

ASIO Driver Support

ASIO Driver support is currently available within Playout as an optional add on. As standard, Playout utilises Microsoft's DirectX interface to communicate with the underlying sound card which is perfectly adequate for most commercial sound cards. Some (notably professional) sound cards however may prove more reliable and responsive using the ASIO driver.

Future Developments - news and updates on where the package is going next.