Airtime Looks Towards Radio’s Hybrid Future

Radio’s hybrid future took great leap forward today with the release of Airtime 1.6 by Sourcefabric, one of Europe’s leading open source organisations for media.

Download Airtime 1.6 now!

Airtime is a free and open source software for remotely managing radio stations. Its new web-based interface allows managers, journalists and DJs to upload audio, create playlists and automatically schedule them to broadcast from any browser, anywhere, whether the station is digital, FM, AM or online.

“This major release follows one year of intense research and development with real radio stations to come up with the features really needed in today’s professional broadcast environment,” said Paul Baranowski, Chief Technical Officer for Sourcefabric. “Implementing Liquidsoap has given the project vital stability, but there’s a host of great features in there too that make the interface both intuitive and fun.”

New features include:

• A new calendar interface with Google Calendar style drag-and-drop and repeat scheduling for shows.
• Show-driven access rights allow station managers to allocate shows to precise timeslots to prevent programming overlap.
• Multiple DJs can organise, structure and upload audio for one or more shows.
• Entire audio libraries and their metadata can be imported easily and painlessly.
• Audio files can be cross-faded, cued in/out and faded in/out with sub-second precision.

Airtime runs on Linux, but can be controlled using any modern browser.

“Go to any radio conference and you’ll hear them talk about Hybrid Radio as the next big thing,” said Sava Tatić, Sourcefabric’s Managing Director. “We’ve been harnessing both the power of traditional radio and web-based tools since our first release in 2004. I think a new era of broadcast is just beginning and democratic, open-source software will be at the heart of it.”

Download Airtime 1.6 now or check out the full demo.