Rapid/Quu is a disaster

[RomanPort]

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.

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.

For how much this software costs on a subscription basis, the number of problems we've had is pretty unforgivable. This software really feels half-baked and unfinished. It's disappointing to me that it was released like this!

 

[RomanPort]

Here's a number of workarounds I've found that may be useful to somebody as well

Spoiler: Rapid can't interact with network drives

This is because Rapid runs as a Windows service under the special "network service" user. That special user does not have the same set of network drives as a normal Windows user. Any network drive letters attached using the normal desktop GUI don't exist as far as Rapid is concerned. To fix this, the network drives need to be mapped (and given their credentials) by the network service user account.

To do this, a command prompt needs to be started as that account. Using a tool called PsExec seems to be the easiest way to do this. Open a command prompt window and invoke PsExec with this command to open another one running as that special user account:

./PsExec -i -u "nt authority\network service" cmd

(you may need to suffix the two executables with dot exe...doing so here appears to get my post blocked though)

Then, in the new command prompt window, you can mount the network drive with the following command:

net use [drive letter]: \\[ip]\[share] /user:[username] [password]

Example to mount the R drive:

net use R: \\192.168.10.10\Audio /user:user password

You should now be able to use that drive letter in Rapid/Quu. Note that the drive will not appear in Explorer because it only exists for that user account. This change also appears to be persistent across reboots.

Spoiler: Rapid doesn't support RT+

This is a minor thing, but it bugged me enough to take it into my own hands. I wrote a piece of software that'll read in the RDS file output from Rapid/Quu and convert it to commands for an Inovonics 730 RDS encoder with RT+.

To begin, add a new RDS destination in Rapid. Choose the "file" output type. Give it a path to where you'd like to write the XML file. It doesn't really matter where it goes. Also take this opportunity to disable your old Inovonics RDS encoder output here too. My software will replace that.

Then, download my software here (or the source code here) and extract it to a persistent directory. Set it to run at startup by copying the executable, opening "shell:startup" and pasting a shortcut. Run the software and you'll see a blank list. Choose "File">"Add Station". Add a station name, then browse for the RDS file and choose the XML file you saved in the previous step. Next, type your RDS encoder's IP address. You need to provide the encoder's UDP communication port, which is 10003 by default. Finally, hit save and you should be ready to go. The next time that RDS file is written to, you will have RT+!

Spoiler: Rapid doesn't support outputting to web streams

I also wrote a piece of software for this. To use it, you'll first need an HTTP server running on the same machine (or one with network file access). This server will be used to serve images, possibly to the public. Once you have that ready, download my software here (or the source code here) and extract it to a persistent directory. Set it to run at startup by copying the executable, opening "shell:startup" and pasting a shortcut.

The first time the software is launched, you'll get a first time setup dialog. You'll need to provide the path to the public web content directory in addition to the public web URL to it. These can't easily be changed later. Most web streaming platforms also require that your web server support SSL and use an HTTPS URL. Click save to continue to the main menu.

At the main menu, you can view station status and add new stations. We'll add a new one now. Choose "File">"Add New Station...". In the next dialog, provide a unique identifier for the station (like it's callsign) and click continue. In the next dialog, click the choose button and select a station icon. This'll be the public image displayed if there are no images available for the content. Now, pick a unique importer listening port. Then, configure your web streaming service as usual and choose save. That's all the setup you need in my software, but there's still a bit left to set up in Rapid.

Log into Rapid and choose the station you're setting up. Then, create a new HD destination and choose the "HD importer" type. Name it anything, then click "edit" under the server to select one. Then, click "add new server". Name the new server anything and type the IP address of the machine running my software into the MSAC, exporter, and importer IP address fields. Set the MSAC port to the emulated importer port you picked earlier. Then, fill out any other required fields with anything as they do not matter. Save that server and pick it from the list. Finally, pick any service identifier and hit save. The next event pushed should go through to the web and you should see my software show it!

 

[Kelly A]

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.

Interesting. Why did you switch, since Arctic Palm was working?
As my grandfather used to say: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"