BIRMINGHAM, England I am the technical instructor for TV & Radio at the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University in England. As part of an ongoing project I have recently upgraded four of our radio studios from analog to digital.
Our students run small radio stations throughout the year as a part of their curriculum. In turn my colleagues and I then archive the broadcasts.
In the past we would record gigabytes of programming onto a PC, manually edit eight-hour recordings into 10-minute segments and then upload them to a server for students to access as resource files. This was quite a chore until we bought two Sonifex Net-Logs to automate the process.
Lifesaver
The reason we chose Net-Log is that it did all of this for us whilst no other product could. It is a genuine life- and time-saver. We met with some of the Sonifex sales team who gave us a demo and I was sold within five minutes.
The Sonifex Net-Log is a dedicated four-channel audio logger that can record weeks of programming onto a large internal hard disk. Playback software, on a networked PC, streams the audio to the desktop, where it can be played out or saved as a Windows Media Player-compatible file.
Regarding the scheduling, we no longer have to come in and start everything up at 5 a.m. The Net-Log software allows you to set up programs to predefine when the unit starts and stops, so we can just leave it running. I feel confident enough to let the Net-Log do exactly what we have told it to do.
We also use it in a non-broadcasting capacity to archive students’ live radio assessments. Net-Log has a feature called Auto-Archive that allows recordings to be automatically saved in the background to a separate server on the system so that others can get access to the audio and also so that we can archive audio files for as long as we want. The beauty of the Net-Log’s Auto-Archive function is that it gives us more time to devote to other activities without having to supervise the archiving process and teaching staff can access the archive from whichever server we specify. The Net-Logs certainly are paying for themselves every day.
There are many applications for Net-Log, from radio stations recording their broadcasts for regulatory purposes, to small call centers, law firms and security companies using them for monitoring. This indispensible unit offers easy-to-use software, high quality audio, broadcast and Windows-based systems compatibility and continuous automatic operation.
Pete Flynn is the TV & radio technical instructor with Birmingham City University.
For information, contact Sonifex/Independent Audio in Maine at (207) 773-2424 or visitwww.independentaudio.com.
