Henrik Poulsen is CTO for radio at Nordjyske Medier
AALBORG, Denmark — Today it’s a remote from a bus and a music festival, tomorrow another place.
When you have two radio stations — ANR and Radio Nordjyske — covering the entire northern country of Denmark, those remotes are all over the place. That’s why speed, ease and reliability are key when we choose our setup. We used to spend a huge amount of time setting up locations, always from the perspective of “what’s possible” and considering where we could get a stable internet connection. Today we just use our Tieline ViA — a studio in a box. The ViA codec is that “little thing” you always talk about. What if…
A one-day audio conference took place on Nov. 1.
Composer, arranger and producer, David Lowe speaks to the audience about creating the current BBC News theme. Credit: Will Jackson
Reinventing radio at the IRF: Paul Sylvester, Absolute Radio (left); Xanthe Fuller, Mixcloud; Nicky Birch, BBC; Scott Cohen, The Orchard. Credit: Will Jackson
Once a week, we do a live “drive show” from 2 to 5 p.m. from the Nordjyske bus. For this setup we use Tieline’s ViA codec and Report-IT app where we record interviews and use the built-in share function to send the audio using FTP.
Editing is done on-site, and we use the ViA codec as a soundcard for playback from a laptop, this is possible with a single USB cable. It’s even possible to make “phone calls” using AoIP software like Skype or Jaber and the built-in touchscreen matrix in the ViA makes it so easy to set up the right mix. The latest ViA codec firmware also lets you record and play files from the unit directly.
Just before broadcast time the ViA codec auto connects as planned using the scheduler part of the ViA software.
You can create as many “programs” as you want, and you just tell the ViA when to connect and pick the “program” configuration to use.
The power of the ViA is it’s so flexible and you can connect using LAN, Wi-Fi, 4G or Fuse-IP. When setting the ViA to use Fuse-IP, two connections are bound into one, and then using SmartStream PLUS redundant streaming you’re rock solid. We have been standing in the middle of 5,000 people and not had a single drop.
In another part of northern Jutland, the music festival guys have been working hard getting the festival area ready for all the happy people who will be spending the next four days in the forest, singing, kissing, sleeping and having a good time. For all the people who couldn’t be there, our other station, ANR will be right at one of the five stages broadcasting seven hours live radio, each day. When going to a festival you always bring your best friends, it’s the same with tech gear and Tieline is the backbone of our remote setup in any shape or form.
[Radio — Old Medium, New Approach]
Our setup for this music festival is a full radio “studio in a box” as we call it. It’s powered by a Tieline Merlin PLUS WheatNet-IP codec, Wheatstone E1 and RCS Zetta. Wheatstone and Tieline have for years been working together, ensuring that you have a hassle-free setup where audio and GPIO (LIO) functionality works nicely together using the WheatNet (AoIP) from codec to console.
We use the Merlin PLUS codec for this remote as we have live reports coming in via Tieline’s Report-IT app to the “studio in a box” as it can handle 6 mono connections in and out simultaneously. Of course, we get the main program feed from the station to feed the PA, and another mix minus for the host. Everything can be monitored in a web-browser back at the station using Tieline’s built-in HTML5 Toolbox control interface.
For us Tieline ViA is our go-to solution for live remotes, and our staff love it. The ViA truly is a “studio in a box.”
