OAS Playout Technical Resources: Deploying OAS Playout

These notes may serve as a useful resource when it comes to deploying OAS Playout (or any computerised playout system for that matter) in a radio station environment. Before proceding too much further there's almost certainly people far better qualifiied in these matters that cross IT infrastructure & the radio industry, the following is purely based on my very limited experience in setting these things up.

For starters.....

...you need a PC (or two) to put it on and a reliable one to boot. These days I'd recommend anything 600Mhz+, 64MB or faster, loads of disk space for your music. OS is important as well, I'd always recommend going for one of the 'post NT' flavours of Windows (2000 or XP) over 9x. These may be someone more complicated to setup but are far more stable & less liable to crash. OAS Playout has been heavily used under Windows 2000 without any problems. Win98 is a possible 'cheap' solution, it's not a bad OS if you're not doing anything else on the computer - ME is just crap (my opinion!) and 95 just too long in the tooth these days. Due to the poor multimedia support provided by NT 4, this is best avoided as well.

Sound cards can be a thorny issue as well - Playout is designed to work with 2 cards and getting them to co-operate in a single PC can be thorny. See my dedicated notes on Installing twin soundcards for some helpful advice.

Studio deployment

I wrote a large chunk on the setup we deployed at Hastings Rock (UK 28 day RSL) which served well for the last two broadcasts. I'd recommend reading through this to get an idea of what's needed. In a nutshell though this provides a networked setup of 2 PCs (one on-air, one off-air prep) with centralised audio/audio database (duplicated on two hard disks). Not only does it serve day to day needs of the station but also provides one level of failsafe redundancy - in case of hard disk and/or PC failure, the studio can be kept going by swapping in the off-air machine or backup disk relatively quickly whilst the primary machine can be repaired off line.

Whilst this covers the day to day running of the station, what I don't mention in the technical write up is the post broadcast work which is required - ensuring the two disks are fully syncronised (the overnight backups are only incremental and don't take into account files which may have been deleted or moved around) and generally tidying up the music & audio which has been loaded onto the system throughout the broadcast period. The other key thing we have is a third hard disk copy of the music which is kept off-site (in case of fire, theft etc.) which then has to be re-aligned with the studio disks. This all involves a fair degree of work.

All this is fine with a short term RSL however for 24/7 stations this process needs to occur without disrupting the on-air broadcasts, with regular backups (held off-site) and providing some means of keeping the disk copies in sync with each other.

Resources aka 'the experts'

Broadcast Computers - Recommended to me by several people 'in the know'