[cma-l] Station Output Recording: How do you do it?

[bruce]

We (Celtic Music Radio) are running 2 home-brewed systems. Both unix-based, using
the JACK toolkit. both running on the same system.

system 1 uses "rotter" - capture audio input via JACK, encode as mp3 (at whatever
bitrate you select), save it to disk in 1 hour chunks. System runs ntp, so is time-synched
with playout system and radio clock to around 1/100 of a second.

Output is stored in a directory structure, 1 directory per day, 24 files per directory.
This directory structure is accessible via a web server running on the same machine, so
presenters can log in (passwd protected) and download archived material.

Files are automatically deleted after 42 days.

All open-source, so no software costs - just needs an old PC running linux and a sound card.
And someone that knows a wee bit of unix to set it up.


System 2 also runs on the same machine. Fundamentally, it's pretty similar - captures audio via 
JACK, this time using jack_capture - but saves the audio as raw .wav files - that's
around 650Mb per hour. After each hour, it automatically moves the file onto
our Myriad playout system, into a specified cart.

On Myriad I have 24 carts (12900-12923) designated as a "recent archive" - for example
cart 12900 always contains the audio transmitted from 0000-0100 that day.

So, for example, we generally repeat our 7pm-10pm live broadcasts between 1am and 4am - 
that's easy, just schedule carts 12919, 12920, 12921 for 1am,2am,3am....


Bruce.
-- 

Bruce Rodger
Celtic Music Radio
bruce at celticmusicradio.net