OAS Playout - the future

Here you can find a summary of the new things happening now and in the future to OAS Playout - in chronological order.

Playout "makeover"

The next release of Playout is probably going to be more cosmetic than functional (although there will be a few new feature due to go in). Playout has it's origins rooted in the look and feel of Windows 98 but with the advent of Windows Vista and Windows 7 now in beta testing, it's beginning to look a bit dated. Nothing radical is going to change however on the layout of either Playout or Playout Manager - it is after all the why people like the package anyway. Instead the colouring and look of the controls should now look like they've been written with XP or Vista in mind.

You can click here for a preview image.

Automated Listener Requests

The idea of Automated Listener Requests is to combine together periods of automation (ie. unattended output) together with listener requests. The premise being that the system can accept requests then insert them automatically into the running order whilst keeping a consistent output - that means preventing duplicate tracks from occuring close to one another or tracks by identical artists being played sequentially. It also has to keep the spread of station idents, jingles and (if required) adverts.

This concept isn't that new to Playout though, we've run an Instant Listener Request service via a web page overnight on the Hastings Rock RSL and there is information on how to go about achieving this yourselves, including a full set of scripts on in our technical articles section. This allows listeners to browse & search the Playout database and request tracks which are then inserted into the Playout system for scheduling.

There are several problems with this approach though in that it can be complex to set up, it requires web server side scripting (& hosting) and more importantly exposes direct access to your Playout database to the outside world.

This next phase then aims to offer a more simplistic solution where the listener simply types in the name of the track they are interested in and a new component - OAS Request Manager - process it for the best match in the Playout database. This would allow for a simple web based form, email and even handling requests received via the mobile phone text messaging network. Currently the software is developed and we're due to start beta testing in the near future.

Playout Lite

The "lite" edition of Playout is designed to offer a cut down version of the package - principally removing the Playout Manager component of the system. In essence it will operate in a similar vein to the freeware/evaluation version of the software ie. point the software at your music and away it goes. However this release will be somewhat more capable, including support for metadata/tag processing, playlists and fully configurable button walls - features which aren't available in the freeware release. The intended market for this is more mobile discos, small scale part time internet stations and even possibly restaurants or shops. Aim is to have a release available July/August 2009.

Automation (second player)

At present, full automation (including voicetrack playback) is only supported on 1 of the main players (the 2nd player can perform limited automation by preloading the tracks in advance and putting the player into Auto mode). For most radio stations using the 'full' version of Playout this is very likely perfectly adequate however I can see users of the new 'lite' version wanting to achieve independent automation on both players. One of the market areas targetted for this are restaurants/shops which have the desire for two independent audio feeds. Since they will almost certainly be using the package in automation mode 99% of the time it makes a degree more sense to have this capability now across both players.

Advert Scheduling

This would be the next major significant addition to Playout - it's currently still some way off despite me having discussed it informally with a number of our beta testers during mid 2004. The idea (as the name suggests) would be to provide some mechanism of generating advert schedules - possibly as short playlists or dedicated 'advert lists' which can be played out to form an ad break in it's entirity. Previously I'd considered a 'points' based system reflecting frequency of advert and peak/off peak times however I'm open to ideas as to a good means of handling this. Thoughts on the forum pages would be good.

Thoughts/comments always welcome, watch the Development Page for the latest news.