Software and Utilities
Comments and suggestions are welcome via support@readyformed.com.
Studio Clock for Windows
A studio clock application for use around your station including a customisable logo, studio name, station strapline, RadioText display, RSS News headline display, automatic status indicators for silence and overload which can be triggered from a sound card and many other on-screen alerts and alarms (such as telephone, door, Major News Story and RDS Traffic active) which can be set and reset via various methods. The screen includes an updatable text field that can be used to show the station's RadioText or "now playing" song details and various other indicators that were originally designed for our in-house management platform. This application can be used with both traditional 4:3 and widescreen 16:9 monitors by changing the config file and works both as a "stand-alone" clock or integrated as part of a station management system. We recommend installing TimeSyncTool on the same PC rather than relying on Windows built in NTP time client, to ensure split second time accuracy.
This program can also run on some Linux systems via Wine.
Download - Version 1.62 - Release date 2023-08-03
Audio recorder for Windows
This simple audio log recorder is something we wrote for an in-house application a few years ago, but is released here in the hope it might be useful to others. All it does is record constantly from the default Windows audio device and compresses each hour to a separate 160k MP3 file.
Download - Version 1.15 - Release date 2018-12-06
Stream player for Windows
This is a simple desktop stream player for Windows. If you regularly need to listen to a number of different public or private Icecast or Shoutcast streams (such as remote station feeds) this is designed to make life simple. Just put a list of stream URLs in the ini file and the player will sit in the notification area near the clock ready to give easy access to them, playing in the background without cluttering your desktop or main taskbar.
Download - Version 1.03 - Release date 2022-03-04
Older versions:
Download - Version 1.02 - Release date 2020-01-07
Download - Version 1.00 - Release date 2020-01-06
RDS Wizzard for Windows
This is an alternative to Pira's MagicRDS software but not a replacement. This is intended to be used to automatically send Radiotext to your RDS encoder and adds a few extra features needed for automation, such as the ability to trigger and cancel the traffic flag (with an extra safety timeout in the program in addition to any safety timeout in the encoder) automatically using external metadata (so no additional hardware or relay switchers are required) and automatically setting the encoder's internal clock every hour to ensure it's always split-second accurate. In addition, Radiotext+ is supported with a simpler set of configuration options compared to MagicRDS, potentially making RT+ easier to impliment.
Note that this program does not currently allow the configuration of initial parameters such as PI and PS. The expectation being you will use your encoder's normal software (such as MagicRDS) to perform the initial setup, then use this program for automating updates and control (such as Radiotext and Traffic) from your studio or automation system. The initial version only fully supports Pira32 based RDS encoders (which may include some versions of the BW RDS2+), however limited support for the Pira MRDS1322 is included and I intend to add other models in future.
For Pira32 based encoders (which I hold very in high regard), I've changed the group sequence compared to the MagicRDS defaults. This may help improve Radiotext reception (twice as many 2A groups sent in relation to 0A). The Pira default is to send four OA groups in a row, followed by two 2A groups followed by any remaining groups (i.e. 0A 0A 0A 0A 2A 2A), which seems a little unusual compared to other encoders (for some reason it's impossible to stop the four 0A groups being send in a row and spread them out more evenly on the Pira32, unless you send everything as a UDG group, which would be overkill). Sending more 2A groups in relation to 0A improves RadioText reception reliability and display speed and more closely matches what some other encoders appear to do. I suspect Pira's original configuration choice might be an attempt to improve dynamic PS (which is often used in the US as part of their RBDS modifications to the RDS standard) by ensuring the 4 blocks that comprise an entire PS label are sent together, however dynamic PS is a breach of the RDS standard and is illegal in many countries such as the UK. This change corrects this behaviour and should have no effect on a normal static PS name.
Download - Version 1.10 - Release date 2018-12-05
Older versions:
Download - Version 1.06 - Release date 2017-11-23
Download - Version 1.05 - Release date 2017-07-31
Download - Version 1.02 - Release date 2017-04-24
SelectStudio for Windows
SelectStudio is a Windows front end to Mplayer providing some useful features for a broadcasting environment. It can select and play one of up to 9 different Shoutcast or Icecast streams and will save the "Now Playing" metadata to a file, adding in station straplines or even the local weather, while simultaneously sending the artist and title to TuneIn via their AIR API. In the event the machine loses connectivity to the remote server it can play a backup file and will automatically revert back to the stream once the connection is restored. There’s also a web API to allow remote control from a management portal and to automate various features.
Download - Version 1.94 - Release date 2019-10-19
Older versions:
Download - Version 1.93 - Release date 2019-03-16
Download - Version 1.91 - Release date 2018-12-14
Download - Version 1.84 - Release date 2018-07-14
Download - Version 1.82 - Release date 2018-05-23
Download - Version 1.76 - Release date 2017-06-14
SelectStudio combined with RDSwizzard (or similar) produces RDS Radiotext like this:
SMS Engine for Windows
This application pulls text messages from a cheap USB mobile broadband or 3G dongle to enable easy access to your station’s text messages from multiple locations. The application then posts these messages to a web server so they can be processed and displayed in a web browser wherever required (a separate stand-alone application could be used instead of a web server). Note that this is just the utility to retrieve the text messages. The web portal forms part of our Broadcast Management platform which will be released in the near future. However integrating with other platforms or your own website should be straightforward if you are familiar with web scripting.
Download - Version 1.24 - Release date 2017-11-19 - Added PDU mode support
Older versions:
Download - Version 1.22 - Release date 2015-12-20
Rivendell Now Playing Receiver for Windows
This simple program receives metadata from a Rivendell playout system running RDairplay and saves it in a text file for use by other software. This would typically be used so that third-party Windows applications such as live streaming or RDS encoders can receive the current track name and display it on a listener's PC or radio.
The program has additional protection to prevent old or stale data being shown should the playout system fail or be incorrectly configured. This includes a default "strapline" which is set on startup and when a cart not flagged for metadata display is played in Rivendell. In addition, a timer monitors the last time data was received and resets the output to the generic station strapline after this time as an safety feature to prevent incorrect information being broadcast
Download - Version 1.24 - Release date 2015-12-20
Zetta Now Playing Receiver for Windows
This simple program receives metadata from an RCS Zetta playout system and saves it in a text file for use by other software. This would typically be used so that third-party Windows applications such as live streaming or RDS encoders can receive the current track name and display it on a listener's PC or radio.
Download - Version 1.01 - Release date 2017-12-25
Windows PC and Server Monitor
This application runs on Windows machines and can send a regular web request to a management server to report uptime and disk space.
Download - Version 1.25 - Release date 2023-08-03
Rivendell Utilities
The following is not completed software, but example scripts for managing Rivendell systems.
Rivendell import and export scripts. These scripts written in php for Rivendell 2.19.2 are intended to enable the import and export of carts either individually or for a whole group. All important metadata, segue markers and scheduler codes should be preserved and you can even move carts between systems with different sample rates. Please note that you will need to be very familiar with Rivendell, PHP and shell scripts to make use of these and they may require customising for your system.
Download - Version 1.01 - Release date 2018-06-17