Hello!
We recently switched from Arctic Palm to Rapid/Quu for doing RDS and HD at our cluster of stations...and so far it's been a total disaster. I wanted to post this to caution anyone eyeing this software, and to give some advice on how to workaround a few problems.
We recently switched from Arctic Palm to Rapid/Quu for doing RDS and HD at our cluster of stations...and so far it's been a total disaster. I wanted to post this to caution anyone eyeing this software, and to give some advice on how to workaround a few problems.
The Bugs
The biggest problem is just how bug-riddled every part of the software is. Here are just a few examples of bugs we've encountered setting up the software. Most of these bugs on their own would be forgivable, but having so many in a shipping project really makes it feel half-baked at times.- Interacting with files on network drives doesn't work out of the box. (WORKAROUND BELOW)
- The playout occasionally loses it's mind, forgets about the current song playing, and starts showing promo messages formatted as songs. For example, a malformed message like "Classic Rock [station name] by The BISON play HERE! on [station name]" shouldn't have the words by or on.
- Happens when Rapid sees a NexGen "top of hour" event that causes it to freak out.
- Also happens when changing ANY settings with the station in Rapid/Quu.
- Also happens a few times throughout each hour seemingly at random. We haven't been able to figure out why that just yet.
- There's an option in the Rapid GUI that allows you to adjust the capitalization of title/artist that's totally busted. No matter what you set it to, no changes are ever made to any text.
- On the online management portal, quu2go.com, editing billboards doesn't work. It'll update online, but it won't actually apply to Rapid. You need to delete the item and create a new one for it to update.
- On quu2go, the blast messages delete button is straight up broken. The prompt to delete will open, but pressing confirm does nothing and doesn't even close the prompt. Sending a DELETE HTTP request to the backend works, but I shouldn't have to do that!
- On quu2go, the billboard dynamic PS field settings are totally ignored. What you type in there is unused and it'll always set scrolling PS to the same thing as RT.
- The interactive website that you can use to preview billboards and the station's current status is buggy at best, often showing the wrong event or falling back to the default message.
- Additionally, that interactive website also exposes the current messages of every station using the service regardless of if you should have access to it or not. It uses a WebSocket that sends events for every registered station and it's just filtered client-side!
- One of the gimmicks of Quu is that it is supposed to make sure all title/artist metadata for songs is consistent so you don't have random songs capitalized. However, we've found that occasionally it does the opposite and it can be pretty dumb sometimes. For example, the song "AA" by Walker Hayes comes into the system as "Aa" when it shouldn't be. AA is the correct name, AA as in alcoholics anonymous, and if it was doing any amount of database lookup to fix names it would've picked that up.
- Additionally, the feature to let you manually edit title/artist metadata per song is buggy too. There are multiple identical entries for over a third of our songs, and it appears that sometimes edits don't actually apply. For example, we corrected the previously mentioned "AA" song but the incorrect "Aa" is still being used. I haven't been able to properly look into all the specifics of this problem yet though.
The Missing Features
Additionally, there are a number of basic features that Rapid/Quu doesn't have. If they want to be a replacement for Arctic Palm, these really need to be implemented.- RT+ support is a lie and while it displays it in the GUI, not a single RDS encoder they support runs RT+. It's only available when outputting to a file, which doesn't count. I ended up writing my own software that reads in the RDS file Rapid puts out, ingests it, and converts it to RT+ commands to send to our Inovonics RDS encoders.
- Rapid can't output to web sources for updating metadata on online streams like Artic Palm could. They claim that this'll be supported in the future but I have my doubts. I ended up writing my own software that pretends to be an HD Radio Importer to receive images, title, and artist from Rapid and forward it to our stream host.
- On quu2go, promo/sponsor messages must be split into exactly two lines which it uses for title/artist fields on HD. This seems fine, but some HD receivers flip which come first. This isn't necessarily Rapid's fault, but they should allow you to only supply one line like Arctic Palm does.
- You can't adjust settings, like the format of songs, on a per-station basis. Settings like that are global to your account!
- Message truncation is primitive at best. Rapid/Quu just suddenly ends a message at the 64 character limit of RT, while Arctic Palm would strip it down component by component to make it fit. For example, if a message was too long Arctic Palm would first try chopping off the entire station name at a time then it would chop off the artist. Ended up making long messages look a lot nicer!
- There's no way to do rapidly updating billboards, like displaying the current weather. If the billboard editing functionality worked it could be possible, but even that isn't really intended for something like this.