Alt 103.7's ratings weren't stellar to begin with, but they cratered once they gutted local content. The listening experience has room for improvement. I tuned into the Stryker and Klein show on the morning drive two mornings in a row on a numer of occasions. They repeated the exact same show both mornings. They often cut into songs before they are done for "two-minute promise" commercial breaks. I want them to succeed, but they have their work cut out.
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I know ALT 103.7 (KVIL) hasn't ever had great ratings, but a 1.1?!?!?
- Thread starter victorres43
- Start date
The automation issue must be an epidemic among Audacy's cache of crappy Alt stations.
98.7 in Detroit also has a habit of abruptly chopping off the last few seconds of songs heading into break. Happens all the time.
The fact Audacy feels such sloppy formatics are acceptable is disappointing.
98.7 in Detroit also has a habit of abruptly chopping off the last few seconds of songs heading into break. Happens all the time.
The fact Audacy feels such sloppy formatics are acceptable is disappointing.
What makes you think they feel this way?
They're trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. It's never easy and leads to exactly the problem you describe.
It's mostly an engineering problem that's been created by the programming department.
Actually they've had similar problems with their talk stations. The Boston board has reported double audio and clipping on iHR stations there. As I said, it's an engineering problem. It happens less frequently with iHR because they actually own a national syndication company (Premiere) that has its own engineering department that oversees such issues. Audacy is very new to this national programming thing. They didn't inherit any such infrastructure from CBS, so they're starting from scratch.
I travel to a lot of different markets and get to sample, but I don't get to listen enough to catch many errors - but I do spend a lot of time in an Audacy market, #59 Greenville-Spartanburg. I can testify that liners often run over/on top of songs, there are accidental overlaps between songs going straight in to commercials, sometimes 2-3 liners play in a row, etc on all of their stations here. The RDS also doesn't work on most of the stations half of the time or list the incorrect song despite no signal issues. It's consistently been an issue even when the company was Entercom. I'm not sure why this isn't something that can't be addressed across the board, or at least on a market level.
I hear tons of iHeart, and then Beasley and even Summit - never hear these issues. The sloppiest sound and most errors come from Audacy. If Beasley and especially Summit can produce a tighter sounding and more organized sound than Audacy, there's a problem.
I hear tons of iHeart, and then Beasley and even Summit - never hear these issues. The sloppiest sound and most errors come from Audacy. If Beasley and especially Summit can produce a tighter sounding and more organized sound than Audacy, there's a problem.
But not so much when the stations were owned by CBS? Seems to me there was a lot of house-cleaning in the engineering department when the merger happened. My point here is this company is trying to do national programming without the infrastructure required to do it. This is why some companies outsource that kind of thing to outside companies such as SkyView.
These in market 59 were heritage Entercom stations owned for 15-20 years prior to the whole CBS deal. What's crazy is all of these mistakes and errors are happening when everything is just automated (nothing national outside of the CHR, where the music etc is still done in house to my knowledge).
Correct. Audacy has an automation system that wasn’t exactly designed for national programming. IHeart has NexGen and Zetta which are designed to be used across multiple markets. Hubbing programming using Wideorbit coupled with the lack of manpower is likely why they’re running into the issues noted on this board. They simply lack the current infrastructure to do it right.
I would say when Entercom took over from CBS, the automation quality went downhill changing to WideOrbit from AudioVault. Just my opinion.
Why do you seem to have such low expectations of Summit? It's a programming-focused company run by broadcast programmers, not account executives. Granted, those programmers answer to the banks and PE firms that gave them the money, but Summit has a more programming-centered philosophy than your typical sales-focused broadcasters.
The Audacy stations in Greenville-Spartanburg were acquired by Entercom when it bought Sinclair's radio stations (outside of St. Louis) around 1999.
I remember Entercom used to require all of its stations to use AudioVault. Seems like I'd heard that was changing, but, if that's still the case, that might well be part of the problem. Granted, I last used AudioVault in April 2005. I, however, remember it being a breeze for live broadcasting and voicetracking, but it wasn't a system you could comfortably walk away from as it seemed prone to hiccups and seemed designed for local automation, not satellite. I remember setting it up to run Delilah on our AC and the automation on the two talk stations we had was really confusing and usually took several tries to get right. One time, we added a new weekend talk program only to find we didn't get the script right. I stayed an extra three hours running the board on a Saturday evening to fire the spots manually while our OM kept working on the scripts in a production room. What a nightmare!
They converted to WideOrbit some time ago. I just personally felt like AV sounded better when automated.
Sorry if I worded that the wrong way - I actually have a lot of respect for Summit as a company. They’ve improved a number of stations they acquired from other companies. I guess my theory was more of here is a much smaller company with a lot less revenue that’s able to put out a much more superior sounding product than Audacy seems to be able to, at least in market #59. There shouldn’t be 3-4 second gaps after a voicetrack ends before a song starts which I witnessed the other night on one of their stations.
It takes time for a company to grow into it's shoes. Audacy/Entercom was pretty much an all live & local company before the pandemic. Now they're trying to do national radio without understanding what's involved. It's going to take them a few years to figure it out.
When the NYC stations converted from AudioVault to WO, I perceived basically no difference in the quality. It must come down to the local engineers and programmers grasp of the system when it comes to setting up segue points and whatnot.
I read that backwards, then. Sorry about that!
I don't have any experience with WideOrbit. I have used Maestro, which I understand was a predecessor to WideOrbit, but I never used it with any sort of satellite automation. I seem to remember voicetracking with Maestro was easy, but I hated running it live. I always thought it was kind of strange that I generally disliked Maestro while I loved DCS, which was the predecessor before Windows. DCS would run and run. One of the stations where I worked ran DCS on the Pure Gold format, and it ran for over a year without even as much as a hiccup. It was running on a DOS machine almost 20 years old when I left.
Hey, at least ALT has jumped from a 1.1 to a 1.5! Though that may not mean much, given the wobbles in the ratings books....
18th in cume, with 375,000 listeners. Similar share and cume numbers to fringe signals like KBOC and KZMJ.
18th in cume, with 375,000 listeners. Similar share and cume numbers to fringe signals like KBOC and KZMJ.
Cannot speak for DFW, but in recent days, the abrupt truncation of song endings has ceased on Alt 98.7 in Detroit. Entries into commercial breaks sound perfectly normal now. Funny how quickly the issue was resolved within days of it being mentioned here.
Unfortunately, RDS artist & song tags are a whole other matter. Whereas before, such info displayed in select dayparts, now it doesn't seem to display in any daypart.
Unfortunately, RDS artist & song tags are a whole other matter. Whereas before, such info displayed in select dayparts, now it doesn't seem to display in any daypart.
Keep in mind if the listeners can hear a problem, so can the people who work there. It just takes time to figure out the cause and a solution. This is an engineering problem, not a programming problem.
That's likely because the music at that time is not coming from their local drive. Or from a server that doesn't have access to the metadata. Probably a temporary problem, since RDS can be a sponsorable feature. Another engineering problem.
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