New Zara Studio

[DJboutit3]

New Zara Studio brought to you by Zara Radio looks pretty good but this is not free worth checking out
http://www.zarastudio.es/index.php?lang=en

 

[easyfm]

If you're serious about paying for Zara Studio, you'd probably be better off going for the standard version of StationPlaylist Studio - at least there's an upgrade path to the Pro version.

 

[XRQKFM]

Unfortunately the new Zara Studio requires more horsepower, and is limited to XP & Vista (the new ME). We have Zara Radio 1.6 on all of our computers, so far it's the best automation under $1000. I would like to have some features added, but even the new one lacks them.



Steve
www.radiooutlaw.com

 

[RadioMan203]

If you're serious about paying for Zara Studio, you'd probably be better off going for the standard version of StationPlaylist Studio - at least there's an upgrade path to the Pro version.

I have received a good amount of positive feedback after I did the Stationplaylist review for Radio World. Before I wrote the article I looked at quite a few low-end systems, mostly because I needed to move away from the disaster called the Digital Jukebox Automation system - the dos version was somewhat unpredictable at best and the Windows version was an utter disaster! I considered many systems including Zara, Raduga, SAM, Jockey-Pro and StationPlaylist appears to offer the most "pro broadcast" features, stability as well as support. I've turned several stations on to it and they have all told me it was worth every penny.

I suppose for the hobbyist, tinkerer or station with a zero budget the free version of Zara is better than trying to cobble together something crude like Winamp and a playlist generator. Without a demo or trial version, I would be apprehensive about buying it. I know I played with the StationPlaylist demo extensively prior to my purchase and I couldn't have been more pleased.

When Zara2 has a demo available I will try it out. I would be interested in seeing how it compares against the freeware version.

 

[Chuck]

There are quite a few things that look good about Zara2. Not the least of which is the ability to output playlist reports in an XL compatible file. If you are having to deal with the nice folks at Sound Exchange, you'd appreciate that, since that is the way they'd like you to report music usage.

I also notice that it has artist and song separation control, which is missing on many simple automation programs. Another nice feature seems to be the ability to automatically delete a file on a specific date, simply bu including the delete date in the file name. I am assuming that would work when the spots are a part of a rotation. If so, that in itself would help a lot. Most automation systems will let a scheduled event expire on a schedule, but not usually if they are contained within a rotation, which I find to be a convenient way to give everyone equal time. Try as I may, I sometimes forget to delete a spot or PSA from a rotation. This would do it automatically.

I would be interested to hear from someone who has actually tried the version 2.