Hello. I'm part of an FM and Internet radio station in the UK, and we use Myriad v4 for our systems. The music and content I have is Japanese, which makes using Myriad very frustrating as the program is not Unicode compliant. Considering that there's a growing number of small radio stations with international (read:non-English) presenters and audiences, I am constantly surprised by Myriad being inaccessible to these communities. The following issues I experience on a regular basis and would appreciate Myriad v5 being usable without me having to do workarounds:

1. If an audio file's metadata contains non-ASCII characters, they are replaced by question marks upon importing into Myriad. Workaround: Romanise the characters where possible. For example, ミリアド has to be written in ASCII characters as "Miriado". This is not possible with some, characters such as ☆ which is used in some song titles too.
• Side note: Due to the nature of Japanese characters, romanising them makes song titles and artists at least double the length, and I have regularly had to make adjustments to take into account the limited length of Myriad's title and artist fields, though I have been advised that these field lengths are some sort of industry standard so this might not be implemented. In which case, presenter notes (where I store the extended title or artist) should be searchable in the database search, as I can't search by these fields reliably with truncated titles and artists.
  
2. If an audio file's filepath and/or filename contains non-ASCII characters, Myriad displays an error and refuses to import the file. Workaround: Renaming the file and/or parent folders and/or moving/copying the file elsewhere on the PC to import into Myriad.

I heartily encourage Broadcast Radio to implement Unicode into their playout software, as English isn't the only language in the UK by any stretch of the imagination. Korean music has become quite popular following the success of Gangnam Style not too long ago, and has now got entire sections on TV and Radio music channels. On Japanese music, BABYMETAL is taking the world by storm and launched their second album at Wembley earlier this year, receiving radio playout by countless stations around the world. Additionally, I am making the assumption that BBC Asian Network doesn't use Myriad.

Thank you,

Peter

Hi Peter,

Funny you should mention that - it was one of our very first criteria for all our new 5th generation products and is baked in at the deepest level - Myriad Logging is the first to ship (in the very near future) and have a sneak peak at below for Gangnam Style on my PC's Myriad Playout v5 wall in 6 different languages


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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

YES! I'm really happy about this. Seriously, it's going to make my life a whole lot easier ^_^

Thanks a lot, and thanks for the quick response too!

-Peter

Hi Peter,

Just a follow up on this - and just so everyone knows! - we now have an early preview of Myriad v5 available and we're looking for testers.

If you're interested, have a read of http://forums.broadcastradio.com/8726/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-getting-Myriad-Playout-v5 which contains the link to apply to join the testers team

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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