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- Thread starter radium98
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I see this was posted and answered 7 years ago. How far into the future is this being planned? I have several radio stations that could use this program if it could interface with relay closures, not DTMF. Networks do not use DTMF or subaudable tones anymore...its all a momentary contact closure.
Can you please specify what closures and how can they be detected, is it some physical port? If you need some non-typical solution, you can utilize the API: https://manual.djsoft.net/radioboss/en/remote_controlapi.htm
Hi Djsoft,
What I mean by relay closures, say if a station is taking a satellite delivered program and that satellite network offers a station time during the hour to play local commercials/liners/IDs etc, the satellite network sends a command to a satellite receiver that has a series of relays in the receiver designed to allow stations to use whatever relays to trigger an automation program to do two things. One is to make an external piece of equipment made by Broadcast Tools, switch the audio from a network source to a local source, this case being the automation computer. The second thing is this allows the automation to play the local audio and then once the commercial break,ID etc is done, the automation "tells" the broadcast tools switcher to go back to the network audio source. Back in the MSDOS days, the automation computer would be interfaced through a serial port. These days that is achieved via a USB serial device. The momentary contact closures from the satellite receiver would in this case be received and recognized through the USB serial device.
No sloppy, messy DTMF tones would be required.
I am a broadcast engineer and would gladly test this if the described feature were ever incorporated in RadioBoss.
You may contact me directly if you need to, as I check into this site only every so often.
What I mean by relay closures, say if a station is taking a satellite delivered program and that satellite network offers a station time during the hour to play local commercials/liners/IDs etc, the satellite network sends a command to a satellite receiver that has a series of relays in the receiver designed to allow stations to use whatever relays to trigger an automation program to do two things. One is to make an external piece of equipment made by Broadcast Tools, switch the audio from a network source to a local source, this case being the automation computer. The second thing is this allows the automation to play the local audio and then once the commercial break,ID etc is done, the automation "tells" the broadcast tools switcher to go back to the network audio source. Back in the MSDOS days, the automation computer would be interfaced through a serial port. These days that is achieved via a USB serial device. The momentary contact closures from the satellite receiver would in this case be received and recognized through the USB serial device.
No sloppy, messy DTMF tones would be required.
I am a broadcast engineer and would gladly test this if the described feature were ever incorporated in RadioBoss.
You may contact me directly if you need to, as I check into this site only every so often.
Serial port is rarely used nowadays, even as USB emulation, so I'm afraid there's no market for this feature, I'm sorry.
RadioBOSS has API to allow remote control from other applications, you can implement a separate program that will detect closures and issue appropriate commands for RadioBOSS.
RadioBOSS has API to allow remote control from other applications, you can implement a separate program that will detect closures and issue appropriate commands for RadioBOSS.
As a broadcaster that deals with various automation systems, some ranging from hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars, I am here to tell you that USB to serial is still widely used, but be as it may, if you wish to stick to API's that one has to build and interface on their own with no proven workable solutions, then this program will be what it is. Broadcasters, whether it be internet or terresial want something that works "out of the box". We don't want to download something and have to tinker and hope that something works. If it doesn't work, stations loose money. Every broadcaster does not really want to be part of a huge experiment. There are already some automations systems out there that are huge experiments with crappy technical support that cost thousands of dollars. If -anything- is rarely --to never-- used anymore are the outdated DTMF/tones for detection of signaling for commands. That nonsense ended back in the 90's.
DTMF tones have an advantage because they don't require any additional equipment, compared to COM ports that are much more complicated to use. We see very little demand for this (I'm judging by support tickets and forum posts) so this really looks like a feature that few of our users need. Maybe I'm wrong.
