Broadcast Power MyFM Training

Broadcast Power 2.5.6.3 Introduction Training Session January 2010

MYFM
MYFM is a social and entertainment radio station
The station runs two types of broadcasts:
From 7:00 AM to Midnight, DJ’s are available to play songs, commercials, and station ID’s and sound engineer live shows.
From Midnight to 7:00 AM, there are NO DJ’s. The air is filled with songs and jingles.

Architecture and Components
Broadcast Power is made up of the following major components:
Microsoft SQL Server (2005, 2008, Express or Standard)
Remote Player (comes with BP2X installer)
Windows UI (comes with BP2X installer)
Business Objects Service (comes with BP2X installer)
Streaming plugin (add on)
Recorder plugin (add on)

Component interaction – base application
How the components communicate depends on the configuration values in the .config files.
Red arrows
= command communication
Black arrows
= data communication
SQL Remote Player Windows UI Business objects service SQL Remote Player Windows UI Business objects service

Component interaction – Streaming plugin
The streaming plugin listens to update messages from the Remote Player and updates the data in the audio stream.
The plugin reads the audio information from the “Stereo Mix” channel on a sound card, encodes to mp3 or ogg and publishes to a “shoutcast” or “oddcast” server.
Remote Player Streaming plugin Shoutcast or Oddcast

Component interaction – Recorder plugin
The streaming plugin listens to update messages from the Remote Player and updates a text log file.
The plugin reads the audio information from the “Stereo Mix” channel on a sound card, encodes to mp3 or ogg file to a specified directory. mp3 or ogg files are split by the hour of the day and stored in folders (one for each day).
Remote Player Recorder plugin disk

Plugins
Broadcast Power has two types of plugins:
UI = client
Remote Player = server
Comes with the following default plugins:
Now playing export plugin (server)
Love & hate plugin (client)
Commercial export plugin (client)

Running MYFM with Broadcast Power
Install Broadcast Power
Create schedules
Schedule commercials
Schedule songs & station ID’s

Minimum hardware specification
Dual core (E5200 – 2.5GHz)
Memory: 4GB
Hard drives: 1.5TB SATA 7200 RPM RAID 1
Graphic card: dual output
17 or 19” TFT screens
Keytec Magic Touch Add-On Touch Screen or similar
Sound cards: Two (2) sound cards. eg: SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro or Motu 828mk3. Any cheap card will do as long as it has a “Stereo Mix” channel. Please take note of the SNR for the cards you buy.

Install Broadcast Power
Follow the online help and tutorial videos to learn how to install BP2X
If you want to install BP2X with redundancy, you need
Two computers with similar specs
SQL Server Standard Edition licenses
Configure SQL for replication
Mirror and Synchronize the disks of both computers

Media Import & Creation
Before you can automate or manually control any audio playback you need to introduce your media files (primarily audio files) to Broadcast Power. The media file type is very important in scheduling and automating. Songs, jingles, commercials and fillers are treated differently.
Two main methods exist
Import
Drag audio files from file explorer and drop them on the Media Editor control.
This process will save the file location, extracting tags from the file if any.
Create
Enter each audio file into Broadcast Power from the Media Editor control (press the “New” button, enter data including the file location, press the “Save” button)

How to think of your station format when programming with Broadcast Power
7:00 AM to Midnight
Use “Assisted Mode”
DJ’s control Broadcast Power
Most important program is “Ads” or “Commercials”
Midnight to 7:00 AM
Use “Automation Mode”
No DJ
No Ads
Song and jingle selection and playback

Commercials
Every 15 mins we broadcast commercials. We call those “Commercial Spots” or “Commercial Breaks” in Broadcast Power.
Commercial breaks are between 3 and 14 minutes in duration.
First thing we need to do is schedule our “commercial breaks” and then we start with scheduling the commercials themselves.
Make sure that every commercial audio file has a “commercial category” when creating from the “Media Editor” screen. This category field is used to identify and separate “like commercials” within a spot (option set by user).

Creating “Commercial Break” Schedules
What are schedules?
Time based (start at this time and finish at that time)
Rule based (play this type of songs recorded between certain dates for the duration of the program element – schedule)
Or specific (play this audio file then that audio file, etc...)

How to create schedules?
Click on the “Scheduler” button
Select a station feed (default exists)
Select or create a grid
Select or create a schedule (7:00 AM to Midnight)
Right click on the schedule and click “Generate commercial spots”.
I used 180 seconds
for the duration.

What happens if commercials in a spot are > or <180 seconds?
Since we are playing commercials in assisted mode and not scheduling anything before or after a commercial spot, nothing happens.
If we, however, have programs scheduled before and/or after a commercial spot, we end up with three main outcomes:
Previous program ends before scheduled start of commercial spot
BP2X plays random songs to fill the gap if commercials have the option of “play on time”.
BP2X plays the commercials before their scheduled start time, at the end time of the previous program, if “play on time” is set to false for the commercial spot. All subsequent scheduled programs will be time shifted, unless their “play on time” setting is true.

Previous program ends exactly at the start of commercial spot
Perfect world situation. BP2X will play the commercial spot on time.
Previous program ends after start of commercial spot
If “play on time” for the commercial spot is true, then the program playing is stopped before its scheduled end time and the commercial spot is played on its scheduled time.
If “play on time” for the commercial spot is false, the program playing will continue until it reaches its scheduled end time and then the commercial spot is played (later than its set start time).

How to create schedules?
Create a customer for the commercial you want to schedule, if it does not exist (Commercial Editor  Customers).
Go to (Commercial Editor  Campaigns) and create
Order
Campaign
List commercials in campaign (you should have the commercial audio files and categories created before this step – see Media Import & Creation slide)
Go to (Commercial Editor  Campaign Scheduler) and start scheduling commercial (read help file for more info on how this is done).
Use (Commercial Editor  Spot Editor) to check and confirm the time and position of the scheduled commercial. You can update the content of the spot from this screen, altering its position and / or the commercials in it.
Note: Each customer has one or more orders.
Each order contains one or more campaigns.
Each campaign contains one or more commercials.

Playing “Commercial Breaks”
Use “Commercial Player” to select and
play the scheduled commercial spots (see help file for more info).

Scheduling Songs and Station ID’s
Songs should be edited in length and quality (mainly level).
Create a “schedule” with “programs” changing with style changes (one program for each style).
Create a single “program element” for the duration of its parent “program” and assign it an automation “rule”. Or, right click on the program and “generate playlist” based on a selected rule.
You should have enough songs matching selected rules to fill the entire program duration.
“ Jingles” are selected at random based on chosen “type”.

Broadcast Power MyFM Training

by Emile Bassil on Jan 16, 2010

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Broadcast Power MyFM Training — Presentation Transcript