Working From Home Resources/WebStudio/Training Part 2 Transcript

Hey, it's Alex here, Training Coordinator at URY, and welcome to Part 2 of WebStudio Training! In this video we’ll cover going live on the air for your show.

When you’re ready to go live, just click the “Register for Show” button in the top bar of WebStudio. Make sure you do it a couple minutes before you’re due to go on air, to avoid running into issues right at the start.

You should see the text next to it change from “Not Connected” to “Connecting”, and then to “Connected”. Once it says “Connected”, you’re good to go! Your computer has successfully connected to our servers. You aren’t on the air yet though, that’ll happen after the news.

Speaking of the news, you don’t have to worry about doing the news! It’s all handled by our servers. To cue you into your show, you’ll hear a jingle in your headphones at the appropriate time, but you don’t need to fade anything up or down during the news. When the news comes to an end, two minutes past the hour, you’ll hear a countdown and the News Out jingle - once it finishes, you’re good to start your show.

To keep an eye on messages from your listeners, open the Studio Information Service (SIS) in another tab - go to MyRadio and click Studio Information Service.

At the end of your show, you’ll hear the News In jingle at 15 seconds to the hour. You’ll be cut off then, so make sure you’ve finished up your show by then. Once the news jingle has started to play, you’re safe to close WebStudio. Congratulations on a (hopefully) successful show!

So remember: your show starts two minutes past the hour, and ends 15 seconds to the hour. So, for example, if you have a 3pm slot, it’ll start at 15:02 and end at 15:59:45.

If your show is longer than an hour, the news will also automatically happen in the middle of your show, on every hour gap, so make sure you’re aware of that as well. Again, starting at 15 seconds to the hour, and ending at two minutes past the hour.

In a perfect world, this would be all there is to it. Sometimes, however, things don’t go according to plan, and it’s possible that the connection to our servers fails for some reason. You’ll see the text next to the register button on the top change to “Connection lost, reconnecting”. If you see this, WebStudio will try to automatically reconnect and you don’t need to do anything. If it changes to just “Connection lost!”, click the “register for show” button again to reconnect, and go on with your show. If it still doesn’t work, double-check your internet connection. After 30 seconds of silence, the station output will be switched to Jukebox - but if this happens, don’t worry, as soon as you can reconnect you’ll be put right back on air.

That’s just about all you need to know about WebStudio to do your first show. Before you run off and blast your tunes out on the airwaves, we recommend you check out the Working From Home Resource Hub on our wiki, ury.org.uk/wiki. It has lots of useful information about how to optimise your setup for going live. Again, if you encounter any issues or need any support in your WebStudio adventures, message #remote-broadcasting in Slack or email head.of.computing@ury.org.uk. Keep in touch, and happy broadcasting!