Hungarian public service broadcaster Médiaszolgáltatás-támogató és Vagyonkezelő Alap (MTVA) launched Dankó Rádió, a new national radio station featuring gypsy music, in December 2012. The station, which is named after the famous 19th century gypsy musician Dankó Pista, is broadcast from Budapest and is part of an initiative by the public broadcaster to expand radio programming for musical genres including gypsy, folk and operetta.
Audio content was provided by the digital media archive collection of the now-defunct Magyar Radio, which comprised about 6,000 digitized recordings in its RCS music rotation system.
MTVA built the production and playout studio for the station in its Budapest premises, where daily radio program production will be renovated later this year. The broadcaster required a modern, self-op-enabled commercial radio workflow that fit within one cubic area and hence carefully chose equipment to ensure daily production and playout needs.
It was necessary for the software at Dankó Rádió to aid music rotation planning and takeover, create placeholders for externally pre-produced news and advertisement elements as well as to provide built-in automation for pre-normalized music beds and time stretch as needed.
To meet the task, MTVA chose the Hungarian-designed 42NET radio playout software. The company installed the system in a virtual hardware environment based on an IBM storevize V-7000 core. Axia network accessible audio Nodes were applied to make the setup as flexible as possible after migration of songs and metadata from the digital radio archive SQL database.
42NET software provides its own music rotation module, but MTVA utilizes a unified corporate RCS license to create the automated playlist, and the system generates a daily official report of played songs to rights holders, in addition to seamlessly working with external systems.
The new station is fairing well particularly among listeners over 50 years old, says 42NET, motivating MTVA to invest in additional transmitters to improve nationwide coverage.
