ProppFrexx ONAIR User-Forum

Hello Bernd,

First of all I would like to thank you for all the work on the software. We are starting a radio station from scratch in Romania, and your application was the only one that allowed maximum customization for our needs. Our goal is to have a fully lossless transmission, starting from WAV/FLAC files, all the way to the transmitter site. Your software mixing engine and streaming server enables us to skip the analog mixers, or the very expensive digital ones.

The enterprise version suits our needs perfectly, but we do have a few questions:

1. There will be 2 local stations, with common music program but different adverts/news. After watching the two tutorial videos on the Overlay player, it is clear that it is very powerful. But as we saw in this thread ( viewtopic.php?t=1550 ), only one overlay player instance can be running at the same time. On your homepage, there is a mention of a regional advert container. Is that a WIP feature that would allow multiple overlays? We could configure two virtual channels, with two separate players, but with one *main* music player with SND enabled to both of them. They both stream to different servers. As such, each station would listen to their respective stream, achieving common music but different ads.

2. Is it possible to MIDI-map the jog wheel of the PFL player to a console? I couldn't find such an option in the MIDI settings.

3. Did you consider a mobile app to remote control ProppFrexx (with a native interface, instead of OSC)? Being an iOS developer, I could start working on one, and I'd be glad to give you the source to make it publicly available, once it's functional (and any other updates). Voice tracking and live voice talkover features would be the features I'm most interested in. I know that the TCP commands are exposed, and I think I could make a direct player on the fly that listens to an iOS-encoded voice stream. Not sure if voice tracking options/APIs are available.

Thank you!

Best wishes,
Andrei

1. Full "Regional Advert Containers" are still on the To-Do List!
However, you can achieve it already today with some control-commands and a master/slave concept, which is explained here:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=727&p=2237

Note, that regional containers will not really be solved by just having multiple overlay players.

2. Unfortunately no, as there is no consistent 'jog-wheel' midi command available even from consoles.
There are also no immediate plan for this, as supporting a Jog-Wheel means relative position changes using acceleration and speed info.
Adding control commands to make position changes on the players might be added in a future release though - but I am not sure, if that would help you - as it heavily depends on how a certain controller transmits its jog-wheel changes.

3. No, as there is already OSC support and even a native TCP interface available.
So if you want you might do it and if there are certain commands missing let me know.
However, so far I doubted, that mobile recorded voice tracks are really valuable (especially when you are talking about lossless formats).
The main issue with voice tracking is how to transmit the mobile recorded file in a general way to the 'server' (ProppFrexx) - as for this I can not offer any API.

Thank you for your answers!

Do you think the Regional Adverts will be here until the end of the year? That would be perfect, as it would greatly simplify the operation.

As for the mobile app, I'll think of a way to transmit the files, and see what I can come up with.

Have a great night!

I hope so, but hard to say yet
However, the solution will probably (as far as I am currently thinking) require a 2nd or even 3rd PC and will mostly likely work as described in the other post (but in a more automated/integrated way) . Meaning the 'master' playout-system triggers the advert/overlay-playout on the 'slaves'. There might also be some other limitations, but as said, the full concept is not ready yet.

The reason, why a 2nd and 3rd or even more PCs are needed is simply because of the fact, that many customers I have spoken with so far not only require a 2nd region, but sometimes 15 or more regions! Thus I need to come up with a real 'scalable' solution.
What is still unclear is how to carry the master-signal over to the other PCs in 100% sync - this seems currently almost impossible. So maybe I just need to ignore this option and offer 'pure' regional play-out on the slaves - and you need to 'find' a reliable way to sync this and even provide a way to do the combined regional streaming. One solution for this would be to either purchase some kind of real-time Audio-over-IP solution (as I do not want to develop this myself, as it is already available) or you go the analog way for this

As you can see, the issue is not only the regions (and the definition of the related adverts) and its playout logic, but mostly about the integration and combining the master audio feed with the regions. But as said, maybe I start with a simplified version.