What Is Radio Automation?
Radio automation lets you easily, efficiently, and quickly organize, manage, and schedule your content, freeing up valuable production time and resources.
Radio Automation Software Creates Better Content, More Efficient Workflows
Remember the good old days of radio when broadcasters had to use carts or tapes for the day's playlist and content was queued up on the fly? Before Radio Automation, if you wanted to keep your station running 24/7 you'd need an actual human being in the studio night and day to manually program content. Those days are long gone thanks to Radio Automation Software, which is now in use by professional radio stations everywhere.
ENCO DAD Radio Automation System
Not all Radio Automation Software is the same. Many large media conglomerates, for example, have their own scheduling and newsroom automation systems. ENCO has the distinct advantage of being independent.
ENCO's Radio Automation solution—DAD (Digital Audio Delivery)—is trusted by thousands of broadcasters worldwide, from local LPFMs to global broadcasters and station groups. DAD's flexible, customizable, and interoperable architecture and interface support numerous workflows.
"We take the time to integrate with all systems, whereas many of our competitors do not because they may deem some markets too small," says Aaron Johnson, Senior Sales Engineer at ENCO.
"This gives us more versatility. We work with many partners and don’t have alliances or biases. We are simply trying to do more with our software. If a user recommends a new feature, we have the luxury of taking that very seriously and really listening to what our customers need. We then take those needs to our development team, because if one client needs it, a lot of other clients will too."
DAD Responds to Broadcasters’ Radio Automation Needs
One notable example of ENCO's ability to respond to customers’ needs occurred during COVID, when ENCO developed the webDAD remote application. DAD developers gave the radio automation software a remote HTML-5 interface so that anyone with a web browser can access the system and control it remotely from home, responding to the need for work-from-home solutions in the broadcast industry.
webDAD also enables multiple users to work on the same DAD system via one browser concurrently. Users can voice track and edit, manage libraries and cuts, edit playlists, and more, all with native browser control.
Another example is DAD’s support of Metapub, which gives listeners additional information about the content they are listening to on their car screens, mobile phones, and tablets. Not all radio automation systems support Metapub, making DAD popular among public radio stations. “We are always rolling out new improvements to our DAD Radio Automation Software, with about three updates per year," says Johnson.
DAD Automation Features for the Modern Radio Station
With DAD, media companies can share content across stations in other locations. For example, one radio group in Wisconsin with about seven locations shares commercials and voiceover automatically among its facilities. Users can flag content in their libraries to be shared across locations as needed.
Podcasting and visual radio are also important for modern broadcasters. "Content is content, no matter where it comes from," says Johnson. "With the online and radio world merging, you might have a radio station with streaming, over-the-air, and podcast content. We've added different features that allow DAD to easily distribute content as a podcast to any platform.”
Likewise, more radio productions are adding video elements to their broadcasts, both domestically and internationally. DAD integrates with visual radio using ENCO's ClipFire—a complete automated playout system melding automatic ingest, media asset management, graphics, and playout automation into one platform.
Learn more about ENCO's DAD Radio Automation Software to find out if it is right for your broadcast operations. Have questions? Contact us, we’re happy to help.
