What's your target audience/station?

Does it do voicetracking?

How reliable is it - why should we choose it?

What audio formats do you support - MP3, WMA etc?

I can't get the demo version to work?

Does it do Internet streaming?

What's your target audience/station?

Playout is targetted towards small scale radio stations - principally hostpital radio & Restricted Service Licenses (RSLs) and now in the UK, the new wave of community stations currently being licensed. Primarily it's a 'live assist' package designed to be friendly and easy to use even for people with limited or no prior presenting experience. This includes at least one new community station and a local school. In fact this is the major compliment and reason for continuing to adopt Playout received from all the stations which have used it to date. Please try out the demo version to get a feel for the 'end system' and if you like it you can apply for a free 1 month full version.

Does it do voicetracking?

Probably 'the' question I get most emails about and the good news is after over a year in development, with the version 3 release yes it does. You can find more details on the About page and if interested apply for a 1 month free trial license.

Voicetracking development is an ongoing activity and more features are planned in future releases - see the future developments page and the latest news on the development page which is updated frequently.

How reliable is it - why should we choose it?

Playout is a relatively new package - it started life in 2001 with the first official release a year later but since then it's clocked up a good few hours of operational use. On a stable platform Playout has run without a problem for days and weeks of uninterrupted operation in automation mode and has clocked up full RSL's of 28 days continuous 'hands on' and automation use also without a problem. In fact there has been no recorded incident of application crash or lockup since it's release.

By 'stable platform', Playout is as much dependent on your PC hardware & software as any application - it's recommended platform is a clean installation of Windows 2000 or XP with as few other applications - such as virus checkers or webcams and the like running on the same machine. These have been known to cause audio 'hiccups' as has the older more unstable flavours of Windows such as 98 & ME.

A key selling point for Playout is it's an intuative, easy to system which even relative novice presenters can get to grips and feel confortable with. In part, the package has been developed with the invaluable input of one of the new community radio stations who opted to test & eventually use the package for this very reason. Many of their potential presenters are people with little or no computer experience and Playout provides a friendly "non scary" package to use.

Whilst OAS is a small outfit - it's been written with the benefit & knowlegde gained of 10+ years working in the software industry encompassing extensive working with various Windows platforms and in writing compact efficient software for different platforms.

By opting for one of the inexpensive lease options of Playout you also get ongoing technical support and help plus the ability to influence the future enhancements of the product. OAS has worked very closely with most of the stations which have opted to use Playout & many of the features and capabilities of the existing product have been driven by requests from these stations & users. Above all else, the aim is for Playout to continue to evolve as product that people want to use & enjoy using.

What audio formats do you support - MP3, WMA etc?

Primarily Playout is an MP3 player - principally for two reasons. From a technical standpoint much of the underlying code is now optimised for this format including a robust audio buffering engine to avoid drop outs and extensive ID3 tagging support within the Playout Manager tool. Secondly, despite what anyone says MP3 remains the most prevalent and popular audio compression system around - this despite various newer formats which sound 'better' or offer more features, in reality most people can't tell the difference and don't care. Not forgetting that every portable player on the market will handle this format guaranteed - there's no competing format that comes close. So this remains the recommended format for Playout.

However Playout does now include support (in some cases experimental) for other audio formats in case you have existing audio in other formats or want to adopt another format for a specific reason.

Since OAS Playout v2.4 (April 2004), the following additional formats are supported as standard:

OGG/Vorbis - (.ogg). This is a fully 'open source' audio compression format which has been around for a while now. The principal benefit to this format is to developers in that there are no licensing or other costs in using this format in your product. To the end user, the benefits are negliable - it does produce slighltly smaller files and I've seen quite a few listener tests where this format does sound better than MP3. However it's not really taken off in any big way possibly because none of the big companies have got behind it. Also the encoder is significantly slower than most modern MP3 counterparts. It also has it's own tagging system (ie. not ID3) which is limited (within Playout) to reading only.

PCM/WAV - (.wav). This is the raw, uncompressed audio you often get when going to a more compressed format. Files are large (typically 40MB to a 4MB MP3 file) and even despite todays large hard disks you'd be hard pressed to store too many of these. However it might be convenient for storing the odd advert or temporary sound bite in this format rather than worry about the hassle of converting to MP3.

New releases of Playout now support the following additional formats:

Window Media - (.wma), Microsoft's own audio compressor is the default format to convert to on most Windows machines but because of it's proprietary nature isn't universally available except on Windows platforms and portable players licensed by MS for it's use. For that reason it's not a format I'd recommend to use.

AAC/MP4a - (.aac, .m4a) AAC (and AAC+ or aacPlus) is one of the latest 'state of the art' compressors also (confusingly) called MP4. Primarily this is the format adopted by Apple's iTunes/QuickTime software however it is an impressive compression system, particularly with AAC+ offering near CD quality at a fraction of MP3 bitrate and hence file size.

I can't get the demo version to work?

This question came up at an RSL meeting recently to which my stock answer is always please, please drop us an email and let us know what the problem is. As it turned out there was a slight problem with the free version which meant it didn't always display all the audio files in a given directory but no one had bothered to let us know. Technical people are notoriously bad at explaining stuff so if we don't know that there is a problem then we can't rectify it.

Does it do Internet Streaming

No, as a professional broadcast package most scenarios would involve feeding the outputs into an external mixing desk (along with other sources) and then streaming the combined audio to the Internet. There are many (often free) 3rd party packages which will achieve this final step - Winamp provides free encoder software into it's Shoutcast server software which we at OAS have used extensively. Microsoft also provide similar solutions through Windows Media Encoder.

Playout does however offer the ability to provide information on track details to streaming servers via it's Track Lister modules including both Shoutcast and Icecast streaming servers.