RCS Sound Software

The World's Largest Broadcast Software Company

Home / Archives for Zetta

Zetta

OWOW Rocks Cleveland with RCS GSelector and Zetta

by

Once the broadband revolution began in the early 2000s, the race was on for stations to have an online presence. For most, it was a means to extend their brand, reach new audiences and possibly offer alternative programming. For stations that began as stand-alone streaming operations, however, the online environment brings unique challenges and opportunities. It should come as no surprise that RCS GSelector and Zetta meet those challenges head on.

oWOW in Cleveland OH is one such online station. In these days of big media, oWOW is 100% locally owned, programmed and operated, serving northeast Ohio with an eclectic mix of music and localism.

Steve Pappas is oWOW’s operations manager, as well as the afternoon drive DJ. He elaborates on some of the programming elements of this online-only station: “We present ourselves differently than conventional stations. The format is very music-intensive with little talk. When we do talk, it’s about lifestyle and local events. Our goal is to superserve northeast Ohio. That includes the combined market of 17 counties in and surrounding Cleveland, Akron, Canton and Youngstown. While the majority of our listeners are here, we also reach Ohio expatriates worldwide, so we really have a global audience.”

Pappas describes the station’s format as “the sweet spot between classic rock and indie rock”, that means a combination of rock, progressive pop, folk, reggae, blues, alt-country, and singer-songwriter. “We play the hits as well as other album cuts,” he says, adding that the outcome is that listeners never know what they’re going to hear.

oWOW takes two breaks per hour, at 15 and 45. There are just three commercials per break, then right back to music with no jingles. “We’ve found that this is beneficial both to advertisers and listeners,” says Pappas.

A format that is this eclectic demands an expansive library. oWOW has over 6,000 songs, with 5,000 active at any given time. GSelector is used for the scheduling, and Pappas has found it easy to customize the program to fit oWOW’s unique needs.

“We go deep into artist separation,” he explains. “For example, 25% of our playlist is comprised of female artists, but we like to mix it up, and not play three in a row. We also play reggae, but use GSelector to sound code local reggae artists differently than national. Also, we code local artists who are ready to break out nationwide differently, so we’re not playing local back-to-back.”

GSelector is also used at oWOW for some of the more traditional artist separations, such as not playing a John Lennon and Beatles song back to back, or Bruce Springsteen followed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. GSelector always selects the best possible song for each position.

It also has the flexibility to accommodate all of oWOW’s unusual requirements. While many stations have different clocks for different dayparts, Pappas has also created seasonal clocks. With a library of over 6,000 songs, oWOW needs more music categories than most stations. GSelector lets you create as many as you need. Among the categories that Pappas has devised are Halloween, Christmas, Irish and summer. It also allows him to automatically adjust the library to achieve desired rotations without math or complex settings.

There are a number of countdown shows on oWOW, such as the Top 50 of 2017, and Pappas uses the analysis in GSelector to put those shows together, adding that it would be nearly impossible to do the same thing by hand. Analysis is also used to create the weekly ‘spin report’ of most played songs, which is posted on oWOW’s web site.

In addition to its regular fare of eclectic programming, oWOW has three special shows, Friday Night Live, Bluestime and Naked Brunch. The music for all these shows is scheduled on GSelector three to four weeks in advance. Most of the shows are voice-tracked, and personalities are able to get their shows done well ahead of time.

Zetta wasn’t the first choice for a playout system at oWOW, but it may be their last. Pappas explains, “Our original system couldn’t handle what we wanted to do with the format. Many of us working here were familiar with RCS Selector. So we decided to give GSelector and Zetta a try, and we never looked back. The two programs work together seamlessly. Any changes made in GSelector are instantly reflected in Zetta.”

Software is only as good as its tech support, and Pappas gives RCS high marks for the help available. “We always try and figure out problems on our own first, but when we can’t, the support we’ve received from RCS for both GSelector and Zetta has been thorough, knowledgeable and professional. When they’ve had to do research on a question, they always call back and make sure that we understand the answer.”

Pappas concludes. “GSelector and Zetta have been able to handle everything we’ve thrown at it.”

Zetta – On Air, Production and Programming Your Way

by

What does automation mean to you?

When you’re in a small, medium or large enterprise broadcast operation, the word automation can mean different things to you. It can be everything in one box. Or, it can be on multiple sites to scale and distribute services horizontally. Perhaps you want to see everything that’s happening, all on one screen. Too much information? Then you just want to look at the piece you’re working on now. Maybe you’ve got a workflow that functions really well, too bad your automation system has other ideas. And how many times have you had to dash back to your computer when something went wrong, or missed an opportunity because that creative moment came when you were on the long commute home?

The great thing about RCSWork’s Zetta is none of that matters. Its modular design, combined with an ability to scale, integrate and create, perfect workflow, is limited only by your imagination.

Zetta has a lot of moving parts to work its magic. Behind the curtains, each function has a launcher app, which will restart a service if it stops unexpectedly. In other words, the Sequencer is separate from the audio playout, and separate from the user interface as well.

Your workflow should be what works for you. The RCS Living Log® offers an advanced level of integration which enables an infinite variety of workflow concepts. And there’s no need to wait for a refresh, because updates are instantly reflected everywhere.

We know, the most carefully crafted automation schedules can crash and burn for any number of reasons. But receiving a text message during your lunch break shouldn’t be cause for alarm. With Zetta2GO on your smartphone or tablet, you can control your Zetta Automation/Playout system from any place there’s an Internet connection. Then you can finish that burrito.

Vastly Improved Reconciliation Options in Zetta 4.3

by

Proper reconciliation of aired material – be it songs, spots or anything else – has always been an important part of radio operations worldwide.  In many countries, for example, commercials will be scheduled by the traffic department and aired by the playout system; but until they are properly reconciled back to the traffic system, the billing will not be performed, leading to a loss of revenue.  Similarly, song performances not submitted to GSelector will be missing in association reports which, in turn, could lead to a fine for the offending station.

Thankfully, Zetta has benefited from real-time live log reconciliation with GSelector for many years.  Any time a song, link or spot scheduled in station’s log gets fired, the corresponding event’s status in GSelector gets set to ‘playing’ (and ‘played’ upon completion).  This benefits the programming department, as generating schedules for tomorrow will take into account what happened today. As a safety net, Zetta also provides an optional full-day reconciliation feature which pushes entire past day’s schedule over to GSelector at day’s closing.

There has been a missing piece in the Reconciliation puzzle where on-air playback outside of a station’s log (via the Sequencer) was not being reconciled – specifically, playback triggered from Hot Keys, Stacks or Z-Player has never been reported to GSelector.  Zetta 4.3 bridges this gap by offering a robust solution that will satisfy the needs of even the most demanding clients worldwide.

First of all, a new concept was introduced to Hot Keys, Stacks and Z-Player: all three modules now offer new “On-Air/Audition Mode” button which toggles between on-air playout operation (“On-Air” mode) and local auditioning (“Audition” mode).  Only playback in the “On-Air” mode is applicable for reconciliation. Playback in the “Audition” mode not only is not applicable for reconciliation, but has a few other important properties. Audio is routed to the ‘Audition’ audio output, then Splits control and Hot Sparing, if set up, are ignored.  The mode can be changed by clicking the button in the Zetta user interface, but also externally (e.g. keyboard shortcut or GPIO) by triggering Hotkey.ToggleAudition/Stacks.ToggleAudition/ZPlayer.ToggleAudition commands:

Zetta hot keys

Zetta

Also, a new Computer Configuration setting controlling the default On-Air/Audition Mode has been introduced:

zetta settings panel

This will be the mode used by default for any newly loaded Hot Keys, Stacks and Z-Player modules.  Should the site Supervisor choose to ban a specific user from toggling the mode, a new user right “Toggle On-Air/Audition Button” is now available as well.

However, firing audio from Hot Keys while in the “On-Air” mode is not sufficient – a few other tweaks are needed.  Under Station Configuration, pick a station and select the Asset Types tab; there, select the Asset Type you want to configure Reconciliation for and choose modules you want to reconcile playback from: Hot Keys, Stacks and Z-Player.  You can also define minimum playback length or percentage of runtime that constitutes “on-air playback” – when met, the aired event gets injected into the corresponding station’s log (on playback stop if threshold met), with proper airtime and runtime, to be reconciled to GSelector right away!

zetta radio asset settings

Once everything is set up properly, any audio fired outside of the Sequencer will be injected into Logs with a green flag indicating a play in Hot Keys, Stacks or Z-Player. If you hover over the icon it will tell you what module was it injected from.  Should users prefer hiding any injected events, they can do so by unchecking the ‘Injected’ option under the Logs | Filter menu.

zetta logs menu

While there are many benefits to using Zetta integrated with GSelector, for those who want to reconcile via a flat file, the functionality explained above will work just as well.  All of this (and more!) is available in Zetta version 4.3.

Zetta’s First Disaster Recover Test in Malaysia

by

For many years, the Malaysia radio market has been dominated by the RCS V15 Master Control playout and Selector music scheduler suite. Because clients are very comfortable and familiar with these great products, there has to be a good reason for happy customers to upgrade to our amazing 21st Century Zetta and GSelector combo.

This year we have broken that hypothetical glass ceiling and start the rollout of Zetta and GSelector in the Malaysia market. Ironically, one of the drivers has been Zetta’s ability to deal seamlessly with . . . disaster!

Media Prima became our third Zetta/GSelector deployment this year. Like more and more radio companies, having robust and proven Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Plans (BCP) has become more and more important as part of their overall security preparedness.

At Media Prima, we use Zetta site replication and ZCast to replicate the content and programming for their DR/BCP needs.

Media Prima’s first DR/BCP drill following the Zetta installation took place at 5am, November 1st when a notification was sent out to the announcer that they needed to start broadcasting from the BCP site.

The announcer duly arrived at the BCP premises and we’re happy to say that Zetta did the job flawlessly by auto-sending all the Assets, Logs, VT, Segue and Commercial load to the BCP site. The BCP operation ran for the planned 18 hours without incident. No need for data to be manually restored from a backup in order to activate audio playout at the BCP site.

From our point of view, the success of this sort of meticulous DR/BCP drill proves how far advanced Zetta is compared with other playout systems. Features like Zetta site replication and ZCast have eliminated a lot of DR/BCP logistical challenges that radio companies encountered in the past.

As in the rest of the world, Malaysia is joining the switch to Zetta/GSelector.

Zetta Enhancement

by

Building a truly capable, multi-station system with no artificial restrictions was one of the core ingredients added when Zetta was conceived more than a decade ago.

There are many benefits for multiple stations to live inside of a single system, and one of them is the ability to share resources. With Zetta you can add a new song or commercial once and then decide, on a per station basis, whether the asset is available and playable (active) on a given station. But audio asset management is not the only area where we embraced the concept: for example, users can create any number of so-called “Banks” under Hot Keys or Stacks modules, and these Banks can be used by all stations in the system – useful for generic sound effects, newscast items etc. This works great for many sites but could also get out of hand if way too many banks exist in the system – and the number is growing every day – finding the correct Bank in a long list may become too cumbersome.

In the latest Zetta version 4.2 we added a few enhancements that will drastically improve the user experience in this area. First of all, you can just click into the Bank selector and start typing; the Banks that match your text will immediately show up and you can pick the desired one either by clicking it or arrowing down on your keyboard and hitting Enter. Even on a system with hundreds or even thousands of Banks you can find the right one within no more than a couple of seconds.

Secondly, we substantially improved Bank management capabilities. By default, all newly created Banks are available on all stations in the system. If the number of Banks or stations you operate is fairly low, you may be perfectly fine with the default behavior. If, however, things are getting unmanageable, we now give you powerful tools that let you assign Banks to one or multiple stations. A Bank that is not assigned to a station will not be available for the station selected in the module (yes, this is rather similar to the asset activation model mentioned above).

On the screenshot below, a Hot Key bank called “Alex’s Weekend Show” is assigned to two stations: RCS Hot AC and Classic Rock. In addition to this one-station-at-a-time assignment scenario you can also “mass-assign” a Bank to a group of stations in one shot, via the Organizations assignment (Mighty Mike and Standard on the screenshot). In this model, instead of explicitly specifying a station, you indirectly choose a collection of stations by selecting an Organization (which stations are members of the given organization is defined under Configuration | Organizations). Through a single Organization, you can easily assign a Bank to many stations in one shot. As shown in the example below, you can also select multiple organizations; you can even combine both Station and Organization assignments on the same Bank.

Finally, as you will notice in Zetta 4.2, there are a number of other tweaks and enhancements in this area of the user interface. For example, it is now very easy to modify properties of all existing banks via the Edit button) and, all of the capabilities covered above are not limited to Hot Keys only – the same functionality is now also available for another popular module, Stacks.

This is just one of the many enhancements added in Zetta Version 4.2. Please check out rcscommunity.com for a full list of enhancements in this version and do not hesitate to ask questions or submit suggestions for future enhancements.

Zetta Shows Off A New Custom Fields Look

by

This new feature wraps up an effort we started many years ago (in Zetta 2.8) by introducing the custom field framework. Zetta now has a nice and friendly face on a feature that previously lacked ability for users to review and manage their own fields in Zetta.

Speech to Text Transcriber

by

(Announced at NAB 2017) – RCS, the world’s largest broadcast software company, has announced a breakthrough in combining voice recognition technology with studio automation. Its new Speech to Text Transcriber makes RCS the first automation company in the world to offer integrated speech recognition to identify Voice Tracks. The new tool was demonstrated on the RCS booth at NAB, Las Vegas.

There is also the potential for live speech to text to follow in the future, and support for different languages.

RCS President/CEO Philippe Generali commented: “There are so many ways a PD may be able to use a transcribed Voice Tracks feature. Imagine being able to visually audit the tracks without having to listen. You can also imagine the system being set up to catch certain words or phrases that you didn’t want to go out, or which contravened station policy.”

The new Speech To Text Transcriber will appear in Zetta as another feature model – the company is also working on the possibility of also integrating the technology into its RCS News product.

RCS says the new feature is part of the company’s focus on providing tools to help broadcasters with brand management and promotional messaging. The new feature has a patent pending.

Playback While Recording

by

In NexGen, the process to record audio in the background is called “DRR” or Digital Reel to Reel, which is a term it inherited from Audio Wizard. With Zetta, we call this process Background Recorder (or BGR), which is a nod to RCS Master Control as that’s what it was called in that product. Regardless, Zetta’s functionality in this module is far and above everything we had done in the past. I wrote about this in the April 2014 connect, but one tip I didn’t mention which I recently used is that Zetta (unlike it’s ancestors) allows you to record from the same record device to multiple assets. Meaning, if you wanted to record an entire hour of a show to one asset in the system, but also wanted to capture network spots to others, there is no problem. While on the topic of BGR, in Zetta 4.2, we have expanded its capability in the area of “Playback while recording”. One improvement beyond NexGen’s implementation of this is that you can actually bring up a recording asset while it is in the library, and listen to, and copy audio out of an asset if you like. And you can do so from any Zetta client on the network.

In Zetta 4.2, you might be interested to know that we now natively support HTTP Now Playing Event feeds. Whether you need GET or POST, you can add all your necessary query string, parameters and headers to create all sorts of great listener experiences using live Zetta Now playing data.

On the Horizon: Zetta2Go

by

In 2013, RCS unveiled the continuation of our mobile strategy. Previously, we had delivered some very helpful “native applications” for iPhone mostly, to help users get content into our products, and then to control NexGen. In the native application business, you have to maintain multiple code bases and when you add features you have to add them everywhere.

Where Zetta was built from the ground up this millennium, it has within it technologies that allow us to dream up all sorts of new game changing things. You’ll read about them in this space in many of the editions. The dream in this particular instance was to have mobile access to Zetta, but this time without having to install anything. Just go to a web page, sign in securely and, well GO! It is super easy to set up and configure Zetta2Go, and your IT team can sort out how to get you into it from the outside world. Some clients choose VPN, some choose what is called “port forwarding” which is to say they’ll allow your traffic into Zetta2GO through a single port which they can control.

At the NAB show in Las Vegas 2013, we demonstrated the first cut of this. This was controlling Hot Keys remotely from a tablet (or Blackberry, iPhone, Mac, Linux, desktop) browser. While modest in features, by the end of the year we built on that framework and had On Air, a first cut of Voice Tracking, and logs in there.

One of the challenges we have had is with Apple, and their tight control on iOS devices in browsers. While you could record voicetracks all day long with an Android Tablet, Apple would only allow playback natively in the browser, not access to the microphone. There has been hope that this limitation would eventually be lifted to put it on par with Android. That never happened and the clever folks that work for me came up with a helper application which we are in the final stages of getting released on the IOS app store. It goes against the “no install” mantra we started with, but the vendor has given us no choice. If you want to voicetrack on IOS, for now at least, we must go this route. We have submitted our helper application called “ZettaMic” to the app store for approval.

In the most recent versions of Zetta, you can also more easily get all of the modules working on any tablet, or iPhone. In Early versions of Zetta2Go, if you didn’t choose the “desktop view” you would only get Hotkeys to work, but now you can see all of the modules and can get the full experience.

In the past six months, we have doubled our development team on Zetta2Go and have been hyper focused on making voicetracking a much richer, smoother experience. We have also renamed it to “iVT” which is a tip of the hat to our Master Control history.

So the point is, that if you haven’t seen Zetta2Go lately, you haven’t seen Zetta2Go. Contact your local office for more information.

Welcome to LAS VEGAS

by

NAB 2013 is upon us and I am excited to have the opportunity to again be in Las Vegas during the world’s premier broadcasting event. It’s an exciting time for RCS as we continue to roll out our latest software in automation, music scheduling, traffic and a new suite of mobile applications -designed to meet your mobile lifestyle and demands.

With the amazing advancements in hand-held devices, RCS dedicated its R&D effort to harnessing the power of smart phones and tablets. RCS has remote applications for your phone or hand-held device that give you a way to gather audio from the field, and push it into Zetta or RCS news. But that’s not all.

Selector2Go – Perfect Rotations Anywhere

Selector2Go, a feature of GSelector4, is tailored for the web and based on the same powerful functionality of GSelector4. Selector2Go works on all of today’s contemporary browsers and across platforms and mobile devices, including most PC and Mac computers; and on the vast majority of current smart phones, tablets and e-readers, including the iPad® and iPhone®.

Zetta2Go – Mobile Playout Management

Zetta2Go is a suite of applications that lets you control your Zetta Automation/Playout from a smart phone or tablet. You can control what’s on the air from any place with an Internet connection. Fire off Hot Keys® or rework your log. Zetta2Go saves changes into the automation system’s library and gives you more flexibility than ever before. When you’re on the go, you’ll love Zetta2Go.

I look forward to seeing you on the NAB show floor.