I want to anticipate, that a few limitations of Airtime force me to use our current setup.
Some missing features for this situation are:
- not being able to schedule exact to seconds HH:MM:SS
- no physical Live-Input for Live-Studios & BBC-Rebroadcasting
- no possibility to set expiration date for files or at least a "remove-after-X-times-played"-feature
- copy show or schedule in repeat with dynamic playlists added automatically
- 24/7-recording
- Per-Show-Recording
- Silence-Detection with Alarm to Mail

Our Situation:
- Community Radio with a 4-headed Team and about 50 DJs.
- Most of them are doing their Shows Live in our Studio, where nearby also the Airtime-Server is based.
- Some Shows are prerecorded and delivered via ftp or personally and just a few Shows are made via ShowSource.
- When presenting our RadioStation at Live-Events, we stream via ShowSource or MasterSource to Airtime.
- Rebroadcasting from Shows from other austrian community radio stations, sometimes live too.
- Rebroadcasting from BBC World Service via Satellite-Input live only about 11 times a day for 5 minutes.
- For having the ability to use daily-updated eventtips, I use a mashup of SKTimestamp, belvedere, delage & foobar2000 on Windows.
- We need to save the last 90 days of broadcast for law.
- To avoid DJ's from hijacking Airtime from Studio, the Studio has to be switched On-Air/Off-Air automatically. (any DJ has a key to our studio and works unattendedly)

Our Audio-Setup (according to the attached picture):

Our AIRTIME is called RASTAMANN (RAdio STAtion MANager New) is Orange, receiving signals from
- Remote DJs or Master Source at Events (green)
- RASTAFRAU Shuffling-PC & BBC-Satellite-Input (red)
- Live-Studio with Airmate-Mixer and Input-Sources (blue)

Airtime hands the signal to a Telekom Audio-Line which directs it to our Transmitter-Location a few kilometres away. There it passes a Silence-Detector, that switches to a Barix-Exstreamer reused as a Dead-Air-Player if there is no input-signal from telekom-side.
The signal is directed to an Omnia FM-Audio-Processor and hands it on Output A to the FM-Transmitter and on Output B to a Laptop which does 24/7-Recording on hourly basis and hands the stream to our Icecast-Streaming-Provider.

That's it! Ten rows explain everything ;-)

Details:
The most tricky parts are BBC-Rebroadcasting and our Eventtips-Arrangement.

We rebroadcast BBC World Service about 11 times a day, 1 time for 1 hour, ca. 10 times for 5 minutes.
BBC News begins at one minute past any Top of the Hour. f.e. 10:01 am, 2:01 pm
For having the ability to place Show- & Eventteaser before and after the BBC News,
I scheduled some events in  foobar2000 to choose random files. This works on a basis of seconds.
With Airtime you can point the duration of a Smart-Playlist just down to minutes.
This, in combination with handling the streaming-delay leads me to mess around a lot to get it work.
We get our BBC-Live-Feed directly from Eutelsat to a Technisat SAT-Receiver, connected through RCA with our Shuffling-PC called "RASTAFRAU" (RAdio STAtion Foobar Remote Access Unit ;-) )

The RASTAFRAU also does automatically rearrange all the playlists for the times, when nothing is programmed. Like a very intelligent SmartPlaylisting-Fallback, filling in Jingles, jumping from genre to genre, etc. It's like people could know it from RadioDJ or similar.
I scheduled this in foobar2000 about two years ago, and this works so fluently.

Our Eventtips-Setup is really complex.
We have programmed the Eventtips three times a day for 8 minutes. 8:07am, 12:07am, 5:07pm
Since foobar2000 also cannot handle an expiration date for files I do a workaround with the File-Timestamps.
This procedure is just done by our team, not by any DJ because it implies to be accurate.
I created a Background-Music-Template (Atmo) for different Eventtips-Durations from 32 to 64 seconds.
Any of these sound the same, except the length. It's like a long loop-session.
If a team-member records his Eventtip, he just opens Audacity and places it in front of the template with the right duration.
In this way, playing different eventtips in a row sounds like one long track with sometimes even different announcer. This sounds really nice and (semi)-professional ;-)
After finishing the eventtip in Audacity the team-member places the files in a specified folder on a mapped network drive. After placing it there, he has to manipulate the Filestamp Create-Date-Time to the date he wants the Eventtip to be played on from.
And the Last-Changed-Date-Time has to be changed to date on which the file should be played the last time. In this way no team-member has to take care of the Eventtips-Content.
I use a delage-command for "importing" the files and Belveder for "exporting" files.
foobar2000 imports only upto 7 minutes of Eventtips, if there are too less for 7mins, the playlist is filled up with austrian music.
If there ain't any eventtips in the folder, just music is played.

When I started working for a Community Radio Station I just thought of bringing a little knowledge into it.
But when I look at the facts nowadays, this is really a complex thing to handle.

Nat Persaud said:

I found it interesting in hoerich's setup that the web listeners get the content post-processing. Radio processing kills dynamics. If you sent the web stream pre-processing then online listeners should get better dynamic range, but it would be an inconsistent sound between FM and online.

One question hoerich, how does fubar2000 connect to Airtime? You have "webstream scheduling" on your diagram. What is that? If Airtime could schedule to the second, would you use Show Source to get your BBC and eventips into Airtime?

Nat

Hi Nat,
we used an Icecast-based STL for 2 yrs, but have had regular problems. This is why we went onto a professional Telekom-STL.

Your note regarding our Icecast-Server sitting Post-Processing is really an import for me.
I did not think of getting better dynamic range when placing it pre-processing.
But I will look for a second output at the Silence-Detector and if available, grab the signal from there.

Our foobar2000-running-PC also hosts an Icecast-Server. It's a tiny rest of our last setup and should be obsolete and removed in near future.
At this PC there are also running two Icecast-Clients forwarding the foobar2000's signal, butt & m3w.

1. m3w attempts to connect to Airtime as a Showsource every 2 seconds.
If there's no Live- or Preproduced Show planned, we plan user-assigned Shows in Airtime, which receives the signal from foobar2000.
If there is no Show scheduled for more than 45 secs, the Listener gets Music from the SilenceDetector.
This means we fill our Airtime-Schedule 24hrs a day with no gaps.

2. butt streams to Icecast-Server at localhost.
I created x Webstreams with different durations from 1min to 60min in Airtime-Library pointing to this mountpoint. This gives me the flexibility to also schedule this stream (foobar2000) within a playlist without having to assign a whole show.
This stream is called our "DailyPlaylist" and is also the stream, which has to run at the PC in our Live-Studio for Safety Reasons.
If we plan a Live-Show and the DJ doesn't appear at the studio, the listener doesn't notice, because the DailyPlaylist is forwarded.

What I want to change next is to get rid of the Icecast-Server on RASTAFRAU and do everything with the one of Airtime/Ubuntu.

Not being able to schedule exact to seconds means several workarounds for me:

1. We Live-Rebroadcast Shows from other Community-Radiostations and always add a "Rebroadcast-Intro" 11secs in front of such Shows and afterwards an Outro.
If a show has to be rebroadcasted from 10:00 - 11:00, I now have to schedule the Show in Airtime from 09:59 - 11:01 and place some well-timed Jingles (49sec) then the Intro (11sec) and then place the Webstream. Same thing at the end of a show. To make it not too complicate I do not include streaming-delays here now.
I face this problem about 12times a day!!!

2. It's also a problem in the Smart-Playlisting-Feature.
Because of the first point I established a maximum duration of 45 seconds for Showjingles to be able to place them in such situations.
Now we do have Showjingles from 15 - 45 seconds lenght, and Airtime is not able to time this that exactly. It always times for 1min and doesnt care about + or - a few seconds. But I do ;-)
It should choose either one 45sec-JIngle or two 22 sec-Jingles...
This reminds me of the topic "Instant-Play" or "Play-after-current-Track"

These two points answer Nat's question about the "Webstream Scheduling" in my diagramm.
I deliver the DailyPlaylist in two ways, via ShowSource and via Webstream Scheduling in a Show.

cheers, hoerich