Presenters First: A Unified Computing Experience

Presenters First: A Unified Computing Experience was the title given to URY's SRA Best Technical Achievement candidate for the 2012 awards. It was nominated, but didn't win.

The name was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Objects First with Java: A Practical Introduction using BlueJ, one of the then recommended textbooks for the first year of the Computer Science course.

The judges notably offered very vague praise for the nomination (while not awarding it anything), instead professing that the systems required less black and more graphics.

Contents

This year, URY’s computing team have developed alongside the station as a whole, and its work over the 2011/12 year contributes to our belief that URY is the best student radio station in the country. By focusing on the presenters, the URY computing team have begun to transform the services that keep URY presenters on the air and with all they need to produce and present shows at their fingertips, with the aim of creating a generation of confident and content presenters who, in turn, can create great radio.

The URY studio clock system was developed this year and provides presenters and producers with at-a-glance information about not only the current time but the on-air status of the studios, the next shows in the schedule, and a reminder for presenters to cue-in the hourly news bulletins. Contributions such as this help presenters to effortlessly tie their shows in with the upcoming shows and bulletins, and thus allow for a higher standard of radio professionalism.

The URY Studio Information System (SIS), a one-stop shop for presenters to access a wealth of information whilst inside the studio, was rebuilt and relaunched this year. This system allows presenters to view presenter information bulletins which allow the station management to keep in touch with presenters as well as providing news about competitions, local events and upcoming shows that presenters should plug on-air, the upcoming station schedule, news reports, and messages from listeners. The SIS represents a great effort to centralise all information a presenter needs in-studio and provide it in an intuitive and clean interface that presenters can easily pick up and use frequently; this in turn helps presenters make their shows more relevant to current affairs and makes URY a two-way experience for presenters and listeners.

The URY Jukebox (iTones), re-written from scratch in Liquidsoap - a programming language and piece of software designed specifically for radio broadcasting. It has a series of playlists that are automatically selected from programmable ratios, including a watershed playlist and jingles that play every fifteen minutes. Dead air is combated with automatic silence detection which warns the presenters and eventually automatically switches the output back to Jukebox. Smart crossfading feature and volume equalisation using replaygain calculation provide a professional radio output. It also features a campus playout stream which allows approved shows to be broadcast into the campus bars that usually play exclusively URY Jukebox. The playlists for jukebox and the station as a whole are controlled centrally from a web interface front-end that integrates directly with our central music database, with autocompletion when searching for tracks and playlist revision management. The web tool also includes a requests system as well for our music team for one-off plays.

We also developed a new online show planner, which integrates with our current custom playout system. This allows presenters to create and arrange their shows in three channels from library tracks, beds & jingles. Everything can be previewed securely from within the browser to allow full show practice and cueing preparation. As we add more and more features, we are looking towards replacing the main playout software, with a modified studio version of this which integrates fully with our broadcast mixing desk, with multiple channel outputs, auto starts and automatic track cueing.

One of the major focuses of the team over the year, however, has been security. After a security breach of the station’s website halfway through the academic year, the decision was taken to completely rebuild our main server from scratch. We have worked to unify the log-in procedure within the internal pages of the site, saving our members from having to sign-in multiple times when navigating between different services and thus helping them use URY’s computing facilities more efficiently and productively whilst the single source of back-end code helps the computing team avoid repeated or unnecessary code, with the reduced risk of bugs or security holes. We have also implemented backup procedures for all our essential data allowing for much easier disaster recovery when things go wrong.