We're a community station that has just purchased Myriad v4 with a fairly standard setup; two studio machines and a sustaining machine. The sustaining machine feeds the output when no-one is live, and presenters take control away from the sustaining machine in the studio to do a live show.

We are trying to decide how best to set things up and are seeking some guidance and words of wisdom from people who have been here before.

The options we have are...

1. Get Autotrack to create a just single stream of logs for both sustaining and studio machines. When a presenter arrives to do their show, they edit the log on their studio machine to tailor it to whatever they want to do live. If they don't show up, the sustaining machine just carries on as normal.

2. Create two versions of logs; one specifically for the sustaining machine, and assisted logs for the two studios. So each show that may be done live has an "assisted" template.

The reasons we're looking into option 2 is that we have a large number of presenters who aren't terribly IT savvy and we want to spare them the extra training need at this stage. We also think that just modifying the sustaining logs for assisted playout will lead to things like pre-recorded links going out in a live show, which will sound odd.

We're also not too sure how option 2 can be achieved, for the same station database of songs, links etc.

Does anyone have any opinion/experience/comments about this setup? Thanks in advance.

Matt Jones
Radio Verulam

There are merits to both ways however we use 2 separate logs at Radio Royal.

Ever since we started using a stand alone automation machine we have had separate logs.  We did mainly to prevent acidental edits that may take us off air, for example setting an hour to liveand putting in a stop marker, whilst the chances were small it is negated by the second log which takes next to no effort to set up.


Craig Arthur

Engineering & IT Manager
Radio Royal, Royal 2 & Royal Gold.

Thanks for the info Craig. And how do you actually achieve the goal of creating two separate logs? I can't actually find any easy way of doing that with AutoTrack - there seems to be no option when scheduling to target a particular log database.

Matt Jones
Radio Verulam

Hi Jonesmat,

If you have AutoTrack Standard it can output to only 1 Station Database (Log), in AutoTrack Professional you can also add additional playout systems to output the log to multiple locations, i.e. so you can send the log to the Studio Database and the Automation Database.

The other option is that you can get a second AutoTrack Database Enabler so you can programme a complete second station (like a classics or gold style station), but you might have to enter the information twice into AutoTrack to maintain 2 stations. AutoTrack Professional again allows you to easily copy information from AT Database to another.

Regards

David Boulton
Brand Manager
Broadcast Radio Ltd

Also some good news - If you're using the most recent release (v4.0.23) of Myriad AutoTrack v4, then you can now add multiple playout system "outputs" to your database even in standard mode - so you can send to both a primary Log and also to the "automation" log database as well. 

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Peter Jarrett, Technical Director
Broadcast Radio Ltd.

Bill Bailey: No win, no fee, no basis in reality. Just a room above a minicab office in Acton and a steady stream of greedy simpletons whose delusion is only matched by their clumsiness

Thanks for this Peter. That still means we need an extra database enabled, doesn't it?

Many thanks, Matt

Matt Jones
Radio Verulam

You only need additional database licences to 'manipulate' them in Autotrack - add songs, clocks etc. Your second DB will be dumb containing only a playlist so no enabler required, certainly the second DB we push out to has never asked to be licensed.

We created the second DB in Myriad and then set Autotrack to push out the log to it.


Craig Arthur

Engineering & IT Manager
Radio Royal, Royal 2 & Royal Gold.