Technical - Archiving transmission

GTE

Hello,

My university's radio station is in need of upgrading its archiving setup.
It was originally built by a computer tech student for Ofcom regulations which called us to archive 12 weeks of our broadcasts. We no longer have to adhere to these rules as we are now online only.

Our current system lets us log on to the archiving computer and simply select a time frame on a certain date and we get the download link. It seems to save in 1 hour blocks and there is a fancy trickery going on that joins the files seamlessly.

We use this setup to take our shows down and make weekly podcasts etc.

It currently does its thing at 128kbps MP3. I would prefer 320 if we had to go for MP3.

Does anyone know of software that could do this job for us?

With that asked, none of us in the station really know how to tackle how to refit it. It was built years ago, well before any of the current seasoned society members came on board.

I believe that the output of the studio is sent to two processes, the archiver and an encoder. The latter essentially is an A/D converter which by some more magic lets people listen to us online. Listeners get two choices, low bitrate and highbit rate. I believe the low is 64kbps, high is 112 or 128. I want better low and high rate.

Would anyone have any advice on how to make a new one? The current computers are so old they may not be able to handle the reconfiguring of the settings that we could fairly easilly do.

I am temped to try and get a computer tech student to either rebuild what we have if it would work for a project of theirs and use a more powerful computer or see if we can transplant the current system to a new machine.

Thanks for the read!

copacetic

You probably need someone to come in and look at the setup before thinking of what to do.

You are also probably missing a key piece, which is the streaming server. I.e, picking your low bitrate stream:
step one is to take your audio output and encode it as an audio stream, this can be done in hardware or software. Then you have a single stream, you need to serve this to multiple users and your archive system.

Depending on the amount of streams you need to serve this can be complicated, possibly it's done at your ISP at the moment.

You can buy hardware boxes that do all of this for you in a single box but they need a level of expertise to set them up and work out are they for you.

Also I'd seriously look at why you want to increase the bitrate on your low rate service, it doesn't make any sense imo. Increase your high one if you like but keep the low one low for mobile devices, low rate users etc.

Trick of the Tail

There's a program called Total Recorder that will do what you want. Its inexpensive, and can be made to do everything you want.

A.