• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Low Cost Automation

Another question. On Network Storage and playing from Network Storage. I and one other person in this group use Synology DiskStations at home for storage. This whole project of evaluating the current automation set came about from a hard drive crash. So we got a Synology 413, 4bay unit and put in two 1tbG drives we found laying around, since then I have found 3, 2tb drives so space does not seem to be an issue now. We now have 3tb on raid NAS storage that the current sam is pulling from just fine.

Will SP play from the Synology NAS with uncompressed wave.

Any one playing form NAS? If so what kind of NAS is it. If not and you play off a local drive in the "player" machine, how big is it and why the local drive. I would like to have 3 players (two would be automated playing a play list, one just a player for access in a studio) pulling from the same files on a NAS.
 
Last edited:
xmtrland said:
Another question. On Network Storage and playing from Network Storage. I and one other person in this group use Synology DiskStations at home for storage. This whole project of evaluating the current automation set came about from a hard drive crash. So we got a Synology 413, 4bay unit and put in two 1tbG drives we found laying around, since then I have found 3, 2tb drives so space does not seem to be an issue now. We now have 3tb on raid NAS storage that the current sam is pulling from just fine.

Will SP play from the Synology NAS with uncompressed wave.

Any one playing form NAS? If so what kind of NAS is it. If not and you play off a local drive in the "player" machine, how big is it and why the local drive. I would like to have 3 players (two would be automated playing a play list, one just a player for access in a studio) pulling from the same files on a NAS.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can network. Once again, join the SP newsgroup on Yahoo, and there are users that will walk you thru, and give you suggestions. I have learned a bunch from them. We play our files on the single computer. We purchased a multiple output soundcard and split our different outputs, with no issues.

I have two internal drives 1TB for main playback, and a 2TB for backup. I use a free program called "Karens Replicator" (you can find it on Download.com), and it backs up new files every hour.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
OtsAV will play from a NAS as well. I'm running it with uncompressed .WAV files stored on a 500GB NAS drive. 500GB is enough for me at this time, since I'm running a 1980s format. I can expand to a larger NAS down the road if needed.

R
 
While I'm in agreement that linear WAV audio is the best choice, it may not be the ONLY choice. For example, if you already have a large library in another format, you may be able to use it without significant degradation. The rule of thumb is that the fewer the number of compression passes you have to do, the better it's going to sound. If you start with a compressed audio format and pass it through a compressed STL and then convert that to HD, it's probably going to sound really bad. On the other hand, if you start out with a non-compressed format and send it over a linear STL before sending it to an HD stream, it's not going to sound nearly as bad when received. I have one client that has a huge library of oldies in MP2 and MP3 format. Most of it is 256kbs or 320kbs. It's going to the transmitter over a linear STL and it sounds excellent on the air. I would not spend the time to convert that library.

So, the point is that you can accept reasonable amounts of compression in the source provided that the rest of the path doesn't introduce further degradation. Also, if the compressed bitrate of the source is very high, then some downstream compression will usually still work okay and the product will not be noticably affected. If I had an existing library that sounded fine, I'd probably not spend the time to re-rip the files until I had spare time. If you do decide to re-rip, then save them as WAV files. You can always convert to a compressed format later, if desired. A lossless alternative to WAV is FLAC, which I think SPL supports, now. FLAC gives you about 4:1 compression but has no loss of quality at all. One last point: some people believe, wrongly, that converting an MP3 to a WAV undoes the compression. Not so. Once a file's been compressed with a lossy format, much of the original data has been thrown away. When you convert back to a wav, the converted file retains the compression artifacts. The only exception is FLAC which can be freely converted back and forth since there's nothing lost.

Regarding NAS storage: While SPL will play from a NAS drive, be sure that you keep a significant top-up library locally. Also, keep your jingles, liners and IDs locally. If the network temporarily dies, you want SPL to be able to keep playing something.
 
Last edited:
Kmagrill said:
While I'm in agreement that linear WAV audio is the best choice, it may not be the ONLY choice. For example, if you already have a large library in another format, you may be able to use it without significant degradation. The rule of thumb is that the fewer the number of compression passes you have to do, the better it's going to sound. If you start with a compressed audio format and pass it through a compressed STL and then convert that to HD, it's probably going to sound really bad. On the other hand, if you start out with a non-compressed format and send it over a linear STL before sending it to an HD stream, it's not going to sound nearly as bad when received. I have one client that has a huge library of oldies in MP2 and MP3 format. Most of it is 256kbs or 320kbs. It's going to the transmitter over a linear STL and it sounds excellent on the air. I would not spend the time to convert that library.

So, the point is that you can accept reasonable amounts of compression in the source provided that the rest of the path doesn't introduce further degradation. Also, if the compressed bitrate of the source is very high, then some downstream compression will usually still work okay and the product will not be noticably affected. If I had an existing library that sounded fine, I'd probably not spend the time to re-rip the files until I had spare time. If you do decide to re-rip, then save them as WAV files. You can always convert to a compressed format later, if desired. A lossless alternative to WAV is FLAC, which I think SPL supports, now. FLAC gives you about 4:1 compression but has no loss of quality at all. One last point: some people believe, wrongly, that converting an MP3 to a WAV undoes the compression. Not so. Once a file's been compressed with a lossy format, much of the original data has been thrown away. When you convert back to a wav, the converted file retains the compression artifacts. The only exception is FLAC which can be freely converted back and forth since there's nothing lost.
Click to expand...

Yes SP will play FLAC. Keep in mind, most stations use .WAV or MP3 (If you ever need to send a spec spot to a client, you want to stick with a format clients can easily play). On a side note, I heard one major group uses 192K MP3 files. On some of their stations, it sounds like it.

Once again, with HD prices so low. Converting to .wav will a non issue as far as cost.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
There is no reason to use FLAC... You are just adding a codec and overhead to your playout. Just keep it .wav

It's crazy that we are debating this. Hard drives are too cheap to be thinking about using any kind of codec... Lossless or not.

If this is important to you, do it right. Rip the elements correctly and run the station the best it can be ran. If budget permits, simply purchase a tagged .wav library of what you need. It's not that expensive and they will be tagged with cart chunk data.
 
Last edited:
I'm building a Part 15 AM station, and I began with RadioDJ, but since it's server-dependent, you have to really be computer savvy to be able to work with it well. I had too many problems getting it to import files, and there's not really a whole lot of forums to rely on for help.

I downloaded ZaraStudio two weeks ago and I've spent more time loading music and programming it than trying to figure out why it's not working, unlike RadioDJ! So my hat's off to ZaraStudio! :)
 
Kmagrill said:
While I'm in agreement that linear WAV audio is the best choice, it may not be the ONLY choice. For example, if you already have a large library in another format, you may be able to use it without significant degradation. The rule of thumb is that the fewer the number of compression passes you have to do, the better it's going to sound.
Click to expand...

I go by the 150 bitrate minimum for MP3. Anything below that and it's poor quality. You keep it above that and the average listener doesn't know the difference.
 
khoculock said:
I go by the 150 bitrate minimum for MP3. Anything below that and it's poor quality. You keep it above that and the average listener doesn't know the difference.
Click to expand...

As long as you're not streaming or using any other form of bit-reduction to get your signal to the transmitter. Those processes add another compression/decompression cycle.

Really, with 1Tb hard drives under $50 there's no excuse NOT to use .wav files.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.
Back
Top Bottom