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!

Craig Arthur

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

Hi Craig,

I know I'm coming back to this one but I've been pondering on putting out some info on how we use Virtualisation here in our testing labs.

This is pretty cool stuff - What virtual server technology did you use - was it Hyper-V or another one?

Also, have you now virtualised your actual Myriad Server including SQL, or is it still running natively on a physical server?

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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

The machine runs on Citrix Xen Server on an ancient HP 1u machine.

Currently we are only running our sustaining service on it as the Christmas station "machine" is powered off for now - studios are free for production etc when not in use for live shows. SQL and file serving are run off 2 other proper machines although SQL should have moved over to the file server but never quite got round to it.

I'd consider moving the sister station onto a VM as well, only problem with this is the PCI-1750 card for controlling the IRN news feed is attached to that other machine.  Ideally I need a way of switching news on and off before I can move it over.  I'm wondering if Pathfinder could help with this?


Craig Arthur

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

Sounds very cool - and Sounds like you've got that sorted with pathfinder too now!

Part of the Myriad v5 family is that the hardware manager is now a Service and is designed to run locally or remotely - so you can run your hardware IO (PCI1750 / Gameports etc.) on a single physical pc, then share that set of hardware IO with any machine running Myriad either on a physical machine or in a virtual environment - it just needs a single TCP connection to the machine with the cards. 

Myriad Logging 5 also uses the same hardware manager, and we're running experiments now with major UK radio group who are trying it out over their corporate WAN so they actually get mic live closures from dozens of miles away onto the centralised logging platform - which is pretty cool!

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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

All good apart from IRN.

I could write bucket load of tasks in Pathfinder or thinking now could add something to the protocol translator...

Hmmmm....


Craig Arthur

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

How about feed IRN into an xNode, then into a vMixer and turn it's output on/off/route/de-route from the air routing?

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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

That's what I'm thinking, get Myriad to send over a command using the TCP/IP to the relevant port say RR=IRNON then have a stack event that routes IRN channel in to the mix on the node then say 125 seconds later routes nothing the the IRN input to the mix.

We are on V2 on the nodes and using the new matrix mixer on the analogue node to mix in splits from Myriad network and eventually IRN into the output TX channels.

We are doing it all back to front as the transition is phased due to the budgets required.  So very soon routing will be based in livewire even though the studios are still old Clyde Eclipse desks, we just use 2 inputs of a node to get them into the system.

Might ping you a mail re 2 network cards and myriad as we are getting off topic now :-)


Craig Arthur

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