Kenneth, what's the frequency?

September 3, 2010 10:20 AM

Anyone familiar with the Simian Broadcast program/software?

Imagine a start up radio station, using already installed equipment (Simian). Equipment with no instructions to be found. We are training with Marketron, a broadcast traffic system. Marketron will send broadcast instructions to Simian so commercials, etc. will run as scheduled. How do we achieve this? Simian's support cost is prohibitive and a last resort; Marketron cannot advise on Simian's software. So, what would we need to get the Marketron program to interface with the Simian program?

posted by Allee Katze to technology (2 answers total)

If you're not already on-air, and (major caveat ahead) you have some decent IT skills available at the station, I'll suggest Rivendell, a heavy-duty free/Free automation system that runs on Linux. I'm saying this specifically because I found Simian to be a massively-random pain in the arse running on an OS that frequently needs to be rebooted. Reboots on an air system are automatically a disaster in my book, but really that's not why I like Rivendell. I like it because it's got all the features of something that'd usually cost $10,000 and doesn't cost a dime.

But meanwhile, here's your missing manual:

BSI has a manuals download page, and having just looked at the most recent version for Simian there's a lot of detailed information about how to merge traffic logs in whatever format your traffic app will spit them out.
posted by genghis at 10:04 AM on September 5, 2010

Thank you genghis, I'll pass this info on and we'll go from there.
posted by Allee Katze at 12:23 PM on September 7, 2010