Gram Vaani devices economical solutions for CRs RadioandMusic.com - Mumbai,Maharashtra,India
Archiving of content has been posing as a problem for community radio stations would be resolved by adoption of the GRINS technology. ... http://gramvaani.org/ <http://www.radioandmusic.com/content/editorial/news/gram-vaani-devices-economical-solutions-crs> Gram Vaani, meaning voice-of-the-village, is an initiative to empower rural communities through participatory media. We are focused on the development of appropriate technologies and have designed the Multiplanar Inter Networking Protocol (MINP) which leverages existing infrastructure of radio, television, and mobile phone networks in rural areas to provide access for communities to interactive participatory media applications. MINP routers and appliances can either be deployed in standalone setups for community radio or Internet radio stations, or can be networked with other MINP deployments to deliver comprehensive solutions for community media, agricultural consultancy, and distance learning in rural areas. Software Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (GRINS) v0.1 GRINS v0.1 is now out. GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaanis MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to share and stream content with other GRINS deployments. Some of the key features of GRINS that distinguish it from other radio broadcast platforms are as follows: * Commodity hardware: GRINS does most processing in software to eliminate the need of buying expensive audio hardware, and yet imposes very low processing overhead on the system. For this reason, GRINS can be run off commodity PCs and single board computers, significantly reducing the costs of setting up community radio stations. * Service oriented design: All functionality provided by GRINS is handled by different services, such as the Audio Service for playout, Archiver Service for recording, Library Service for storage, etc. Each of these services can be run either on a single machine, or off multiple machines. This makes the deployment of GRINS extremely flexible to be able to fit into any kind of a radio station setup.
