Going off what my colleague Andy said, Rivendell has worked well for us but I won't paint quite so rosy a picture about the useability. For starters, Linux itself can be a barrier, even though we use Ubuntu whose UI is relatively similar to Apple (the collegiate laptop standard). Second, we jury-rig an automation mode on top of it, so users can play songs ad-hoc or tell the machine operate autonomously when they leave. I'll spare you the details unless someone asks, but it required both config and source code changes to get right from a useability standpoint. And when a useability failure means hours of dead air, it's important to get it right.
Luckily, Rivendell is open source, so we can make modifications to it as necessary and also write scripts to interface with it. For example, I doubt a closed-source solution would let a custom script change the SQL out from under it, but that's exactly how our automated lyrics scanning program tags songs as explicit. We also have a script that logs to Spinitron (which is also recommended for college radio, the one caveat being that the user management backend doesn't scale well to the hundreds of users you'll have in a few years). I'm happy to elaborate on our setup if anyone cares, but the big picture is this: Rivendell requires, and permits, some customization and maintenance to get right. It's not plug-and-play, but in return, it won't lock you out. Thanks, Max Goldstein Operations Director WMFO Medford On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Christopher Cmolik (RIT Student) < clc5...@rit.edu> wrote: > WITR in Rochester, NY has been running on Rivendell for about four years > now. It's worked pretty well for our purposes; in fact the major issue we > had was convincing people to play from Rivendell rather than from CDs or > (bad-quality) Vinyl. > > We're lucky to have many linux-type students here so setup wasn't as big > of an issue as it could possibly be in other stations. > > On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Rob Landry <41001...@interpring.com>wrote: > >> >> >> On Tue, 5 Mar 2013, Andy Sayler wrote: >> >> We're a college radio station who has been using Rivendell and Linux for >>> over 5 years now. We're always happy to talk to others about >>> our reasons for >>> using Rivendell (and do on a regular basis), but Alan hits on many >>> of the reasons above. Also, we've found it's actually far more usable by >>> novice radio hosts than many of the "commercial" systems. >>> >> >> Down the street from WMFO is another college station, WHRB. They were >> running AudioVault and having no end of trouble with it, largely because it >> was hard to learn. They switched to Rivendell three years ago and have >> never looked back. >> >> >> Rob >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Rivendell-dev mailing list >> Rivendell-dev@lists.rivendellaudio.org >> http://lists.rivendellaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev >> >> > > > -- > > *Chris Cmolik *|* RIT Information Technology '13* > > Chief Engineer Emeritus, WITR Radio > > _______________________________________________ > Rivendell-dev mailing list > Rivendell-dev@lists.rivendellaudio.org > http://lists.rivendellaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev > >
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