Been having a play around with Myriad in a virtual machine environment at Radio Royal.

We broadcast to the Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Larbert over DVB-T or Freeview and the encoder we have (Promax DT504) has a few spare channels on it. So for the past couple of years the Guys at P Squared Broadcast Radio have arranged a temporary Myriad licence for us to run a pop up radio station – Royal Christmas.

Last year we had it play out from a PC we used to use with Myriad V3, it was old hadn’t been used for yonks and it showed, kept having problems with it crashing and stuttering.  So this year we had this service played out from a Windows 7 based virtual machine on an old HP server we had. 

The Xen Server was also running the automation sustaining service VM for Radio Royal that plays out what we call Royal Replays of previous shows (we use Powerlog and the “Listen Again” add on option to export 58 minute chunks back into Myriad and then play these out another couple of times each week – all hours are either live or “as live” – either replay or voice tracked).

Audio works via Axia streams from the VM to an analogue node and then into the transmission switcher.

Have to say been very impressed with it, the server is a bit long in the tooth so you couldn’t run loads of machines on it, but it’s been rock solid and just worked, to the point we are looking to get a higher powered server and move some more stuff to it.  Once you break the ties to physical audio cards it becomes so much easier to virtualise your infrastructure.

We currently use an Advantech PCI-1750 card to switch the IRN feed into the distribution amp as required and if that can be made to work using Myriad from within a virtual machine I’m all ears!