Radio World Buyer’s Guide articles are intended to help readers understand why their colleagues chose particular products to solve various technical situations. This month’s articles focus on products automation.
Pubcasting industry veteran Chuck Leavens uses multiple ENCO DAD systems to run jazz-formatted WZUM in Pittsburgh and, separately, the nation’s largest nationally syndicated 24×7 jazz “white label” music service.
DAD’s database architecture along with its DAD Command Language, or DCL, has allowed him to write scripts to automate various aspects of his nationally distributed continuous radio service, building a virtual footprint of contributing hosts from around the country.
The host shares their content files via the internet, which are then curated by Leavens in Pittsburgh and automated out of the NOC at NPR headquarters in Washington. ENCO says coast-to-coast “virtual operations” were part of this user’s plan well before the pandemic began.
Leavens says he is impressed by the automation system’s reliability; outside of a failed hard drive, he said, only the local power company has had an adverse impact on his programming.
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According to ENCO, “What’s amazing about PubMusic’s programming is how they enable local stations to brand the music as their own. At precise times, PubMusic inserts proper DAD-generated logic commands to alert location stations downstream when to automatically insert their own promos, underwriting, lead-ins and so forth, all backed by internationally recognized content curated by PubMusic.”
Local WZUM in Pittsburgh also is a customer, with its own local-interest stories, program and host voiceovers.
“Another key piece of ENCO’s DCL is how it enables Chuck to program DAD to shift time across four time zones by stacking playlists, such that each local station gets the right content, every time,” the company says,
Then he built a custom checking routing to ensure branches are reset properly to their timeframes, and to make playlists self-correcting.
