ControlReady is a true WAV Windows multimedia automation system

Tired of jumping through hoops to get audio in and out of your automation system. WireReady wrote it's entire automation to accept standard WAV files. The software can read them off CD, DVD and network sharable folders, servers, even FTP locations. The automation can be programmed to automatically "sync" with your production studios, maintain backup servers and workstations, and pull from 3rd party systems like NPR's Content Depot.

WireReady stores everything as standard Microsoft *.WAV files for a couple reasons. The first is linear quality. Natively stored as a linear file gives you pur unadulterated sound coming out of the computer. Many broadcasters already employ MPEG or similar compressions going through their STLs and other links to their towers. HD radio itself uses compression. The fewer times you compress an audio file translates into better quality. Because hard drive are so big, it no longer makes sense to compress the storage.

The second is the RIFF header and INFO chunk standards. Standard WAV files have headers that tell a computer what kind of file it is (mono, stereo, bit/sample rates, format, etc.), and they have information like descriptions, start/stop dates, etc. (INFO) in the file. Microsoft has long established standards for this. Some automation companies use proprietary cart chunk and other schemes to manage metadata. Worse, some automation compainie have a separate database that holds this info. WireReady embeds all the textual information you use with your audio in the audio files themselves inside one of the standard (COMMENT) INFO fields. In this fashion, we are compatible with anything that's out there. Many RAW compressed files including MP3 files you might find on the Internet lack headers or info chunks and that can create problems.

Another reason is reliability. Unless you use a special sound card - playing compressed audio files on a Windows computer can be dangerous. Most audio cards expect the sound data to be PCM (uncompressed). If you play an MP3 file - Windows has to do a lot of math and decompress that audio on the fly. This can lead to skips and glitches. While there are some special sound cards on the market that can do this decompression on the card itself - 99% of the cards out there don't do this. So by using standard WAV files - we remove the chance that Windows has to do a lot of math to get the file to play the second you need it on the air.

What about MP3 files and other compressed files? Have no fear - just because we store, play and record in linear WAV doesn't mean you can't load or save files in or out of the WireReady system as MP3. Check out the article we have about our support for MPEG/MP3 files.

 

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