Issue 53 SMARTS Broadcast Systems January 1999
Happy New Year! Here we are at the very beginning of the first month of the last year in this century. We're hoping you have a great year…and that it is just a taste of what is to come in the new century.
ENGINEERING
We charge $80 an hour to assist you by phone when an engineering question comes up after-hours. Our after-hours Support Line is for off-air emergencies only. That technician is there to get your SMARTCASTER back on the air as quickly as possible. A scheduled format or equipment change is time-consuming and is not an off-air emergency. If the after-hours time period is the only time your engineer can work, you need to call the Support Line in advance to arrange for assistance.
CLEAN-UP
The major deadline of the radio year has passed, and it is time to put our house in order. Christmas audio, whether it is greetings, commercials, or music, is painfully obvious when it plays after Christmas. This is the time of the year when the music is put away and the greetings and commercials are deleted from the hard drive. Take the time to do a proper job of it. That may mean doing it in stages. Use Cut Manager or List and Delete to sort by End Date or by Name and print out the list. Show it to the Sales Department so that they are aware of some of the stuff that will get the axe. Use their input (because they will want to save a few) and delete as many audio cuts as possible. Once that is done, take the time to Defrag your system. Your system has been fragmented by all of the audio that has been put on and taken off recently. Defragging makes the system run smoother. Not only do you reduce the risk of embarrassing audio, but also you eliminate gaps in audio because the hard drive doesn't have to work as hard. Yes, it is worth the time it takes.
And now, a word from our President:
Millenium Problem Update
SMARTCASTER operators will find a millenium bug that may crop up well in advance of the year 2000. When you record a file with a start date in '99 and a stop date at '00 or later, you have no difficulty. However, when you try to place that spot on the breaklog, either manually or via a logging program, it will be flagged as an outdated spot. If you have the SMARTCASTER set to not play outdated spots, it will not play.
We are currently writing routines to fix this problem. In the meantime we are advising all of our customers to refrain from "spanning the millenium". In other words, if you have a time order that starts this year and ends after 2000, put a stop date of 12/31/99 on the spot for the moment. We will be providing a utility to move that date at a later time.
If you do log a stop date in the year 2000, you will notice that the "00" does not print in the breaklog screen. If you log a stop date in 2001, only the 1 appears. Our new breaklog editor, which will be provided to you this year, will solve that problem.
As we approach 2000 we anticipate several millenium-related issues to come up. We need your feedback to tell us if there are others we have missed.
Our goal is to have all known problems solved well in advance of the end of the year. To date we have not seen any really serious situations and do not anticipate that we will. Please keep us informed of anything you run into at the operator level. This is for any of our products, SMARTCASTER, SMARTS Office, and Digital Program Director.
John F. Schad
President
SMARTS Broadcast Systems
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OFFICE: 800-747-6278 SUPPORT: 800-765-2930
SALES: 800-498-0487 E-MAIL: support@smartsbroadcast.com
WEBSITE: http://www.smartsbroadcast.com |