Here is my contribution to the topic with a half-dozen years of Rivendell now under my belt.
The Brett blog entry on scheduling has some useful tips: https://thebrettblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/rivendell-how-to-schedule-music/ One of the suggestions I have found very valuable is to tag all music with Brett's idea of whether it is LOSS or NOLOSS. It is impossible these days to avoid MP3's, as even many record company distribution channels offer only MP3's. Marking whether a track is lossy or not, has really helped when we get access to a no-loss track that can replace a lossy one. Without having tagged those lossy tracks, we would not know what the original was--or if it needed to be replaced or not. I am the one maintaining the music part of the library and we currently have over 40,000 tracks. I started that task in 2011, and it is still not done. These days I only work an hour a day on it (if that), but for 40,000 tracks from scratch, it would be a fulltime job for several people, and even then I cannot see it taking less than a year. No wonder the big chain operations have a drive at the home office for each format, and just clone one for a format switch at an owned station. We were lucky enough to be able to import about 75% of our library from another operation's rips (we do own and possess all the tracks in question on CD or vinyl, we just didn't rip all of them by ourselves), and when you do that--if they are tagged correctly with metadata,--all of that is imported, AND you can set start/end/segue markers with the "rdimport" command from a terminal during import--or with "rdmarkerset" after import. My experience is that the 80/20 rule applies and about 80% of the tracks are perfect with the rdimport parameters; the other 20% need tweaked. The current rotation is from about 2,000 of the 40,000 so the challenge is doable as only a small number are dropped/added to the 2,000 at any one time. That 2,000 may seem like a lot, but in our format, it means if we did not repeat until everything was played, we would start repeating after only 7 days (we do repeat before 7 days, however). If you don't have many stopsets or they are short, it is easy to chew through a good 300 to 350 3-to-4 minute tracks a day. Our music library occupies by far the largest number of carts; second is voice-tracks. I put both of those groups starting well after anything else that we use. Music starts at 100,001 and goes to 499,999. Voice-tracks start at 500,001 and go to 699,999. We have 2 formats of music, and one starts at 100,001. I forced the other to start imports at 200,001 by changing the Music group to start at 200,001 when importing the second format's tracks--thus, it is easy to identify which track goes with which format by the cart number. Imports now are minimal and easily managed from week-to-week--unless there is a future decision to include yet another format. I was a musician in an earlier life, so our segues are all placed to fade/start at musical points, and not jammed together at random points that so many stations today do with non-musicians in control of music and production policy. That takes a lot of work, but the 2,000 are done and then some, while checking and marking the rest of the library is what I now spend most of my time on. Robert is so very correct that even big label releases often have audio defects, and I listen to every new rip carefully. Very short squeaks, clicks, and pops can be edited out without detection if the 'zero crossing point' feature of WAV editors is used and the material excised is very short. The WAV editor in Exact Audio Copy is hard to navigate, but does not transcode audio and therefore is totally transparent (EAC works with WINE on my system). Editing in Audacity transcodes in and out of the Audacity format and adds a noise threshold that is louder than the -71db silence level that we hope to maintain. A lot of songs are chopped quickly and unnaturally at the end, and I use Audacity to add natural sounding reverb ringout to those, in addition to boosting long fadeouts so they can end more quickly without an annoyingly long fadeout. The disadvantage is that I have to manually set the start and end markers to anything done in Audacity, because the start and end silence will be louder than our -71 trim setting. All music is imported to the Music group, but we created other groups for the log generator to schedule from, and moving carts in and out of those groups (with no forced number assignments) is how we establish and change the rotation. Hope all that is helpful, but I agree with everyone's stress on thinking through the groups and number assignments before beginning, as it is not easy to move carts around in Rivendell--as currently, it must be done by manually copying and pasting each cut in each cart, one at a time. Furthermore, with the cart number being the keystone of identification, changing cart numbers can mean the wrong content could easily be played if various carts are part of pre- or post- import events in the scheduler, as those events do not know you are moving a cart's contents (and you may not even know they are contained in pre/post events when you move the cart). On the other hand, changes to the group a cart belongs to, has no effect on the cart being played, as the scheduled cart number will be played regardless of what group it belongs to. Happy importing. All-in-all, I enjoy it more than carting up content like in the old days. One thing is for sure--Rivendells carts are not going to tighten up and freeze, nor are they going to get the heads dirty and muffle the sound. --Chuck W. _______________________________________________ Rivendell-dev mailing list [email protected] http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
