The first automation system Music 1 made a playlist for was Scott Studios/SS32/WideOrbit. That was 1994, the year M1 Version 1.0 was released. Since then we’ve added automation-specific playlist outputs for about fifty different ones. PlayoutONE is the best bang-for-the-buck I’ve ever seen. Several hundred M1 stations are using PlayoutONE already. If you are contemplating a change, the program below should give you a reason to call me to ask more about it.
We first met the team behind this fine automation system seven years ago when Dave Brierley-Jones, the guy you’ll see in the videocast below, called me from the UK seeking to pair their second radio automation system with our music scheduler for a really tight integration. Like for example, you put a new audio file into a folder, it auto-imports into the automation system. As it does, the audio is normalized, silence at the front or backend is removed and a spot-on perfect merge-marker is placed creating smooth segues out of the box. The meta-data inserts directly into M1. If you change a song title in M1, it immediately updates in the player’s database. Each time you save a playlist, it is instantly available in the automation system. That was just for starters.
Within a year of our meeting, the third generation of their system was ready. They named it PlayoutONE. Out of the gate, it was brilliant. And today, with several more years of rapid evolution, the system is fantastic. Growth has been rapid because the package is that good!
The videocast linked below was streamed Oct. 30th on “This Week In Radio Tech”. It is a brisk 70 minutes and I guarantee you will see some things in P1 that will amaze you, too. Here are a few markers that are good:
- At 20:00: Radio In The Cloud. Everything is there; The player, the music scheduler and the traffic software and with PlayoutONE delivering the stream to the transmitter.
- At 28:00: A discussion about automation databases, importing audio and moving from one system to another.
- At 40:00: A tour of PlayoutONE itself.
You can click to anywhere in the hour and hear something interesting, Like, the Monitor will email you if tomorrow’s music or traffic schedule isn’t ready, or if your internet stream goes silent. To me, the absolute greatest thing is WebVT. With this, you can voice-track from any web browser, from anywhere and drop it into the on-air playlist before the end of the currently-playing song. And the just-introduced LiveMic even one-ups that.
Also, I must compliment the host, Kirk Harnack. If you’ve ever been to a NAB convention, you’ve met him at a booth. I think he was working with Dave Scott/Scott Studios we first said Hi, way back when. Kirk has a deep knowledge of our business and really moved this interview and demonstration along briskly. This pro knows radio like few men do.