RE: [backstage] Last played songs?

[Tristan Ferne]

Yes, there are plans to have feeds of recently played songs though I'm not sure what the timescale is. And I think there are rights issues around making this kind of information available. In the meantime you might want to have a look at http://www.last.fm/user/sekrit/ and its friends.   Anyway, this is how I understand it works: production teams preload tracks onto the hard disk playout system (VCS) and the tracks are then played out in that order during the show - actually controlled by a couple of faders. The detail of exactly how it is used will change from show to show. At the moment we have Radios 1, 2, 1Xtra and 6Music running from VCS and, as you say, not everything is played out from VCS. Also a lot of late night shows (i.e. lots the specialist music stuff) are pre-recorded and loaded onto VCS as (e.g.) 2-hour chunks so we don't get the track info for these. But we're working on it...   Tristan   ----------------------------- Tristan Ferne Senior Development Producer (R&D) BBC Radio & Music Interactive   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 14 May 2006 19:29 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: [backstage] Last played songs? I was wondering if the BBC has any plans to have the last played songs made available on the website live, as they get played out, like they do on some other stations.   Now that the BBC are (have already?) shifted towards VCS at BBC Radio 1 and 2 for playout of most of their things (I guess the specialist shows have to be manually play listed written after the show since they run off CDs and vinyl), surely it’s possible for some sort of thing to be done with the data that is collated by these systems for music license fee collection to be pushed to a feed as is done with the latest headlines on BBC News – I am not 100% sure of the technical ins and outs of this, but surely something could be knocked up for people at Backstage to play with?   For those in the know, I’d be interested in how the playout systems and other things on the radio side work. i.e. what does a presenter do to play something? Do the presenters choose the order of the songs, or does their producer do it? That kind of thing …   Thanks   - C