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.

Voice Tracking - Phase II

OAS Playout V3 is the first release of Playout to include voice tracking capability. With the advent of community radio in the UK and the issues surrounding how to staff/prgramme these on a 24/7 basis, this ability may well be key in any Playout system.

The feedback on the voicetracking engine has been very positive, the next key development activity is to speed up the segue editor used during editing of the voicetrack programme. This should help reduce further the time needed create a voicetrack programme.

Segue Editor

Once this process is complete, further enhancements to the editor are planned including the ability to shift cue points on the fly (to start playback of tracks at points other than their preset cues) and the ability to stop playback of a track early rather than using the default fade out capability. There are also plans to improve the auto/cross fade mechanism to provide a smoother transition.

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.