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Foreign Language Support

Hi,


We have a potential major project, that would involve remote broadcasting from overseas. Does anyone know if we can use the software in a foreign language, say Spanish, and integrate this with a database held in the UK.


More specifically, could an overseas user download the PlayItLive software, and use it in their native language, with access to a UK database.


Thanks in advance.


Hi Jason,


Thanks for the reply. We love the software, and hope that we can perhaps make some adjustments so that we don't need a foreign interface.


I get where you're coming from with the language complications. Now I know that it's not really a goer, we will consider an alternative approach. We may need a local English speaker, but que sera, sera.


It's not really voice tracking that we were looking for, it was for live transmissions, but we can work around that also, using our remote AOIP link.


The software has been a God send to us during the covid-19 pandemic, and thank you for building such a versatile playout solution.


Best wishes,


John.

If you are wanting to run a "continuity" operation in the UK and have whole programme items in the schedule from abroad this is entirely practical with PlayIt Live.


Have a read of "Using streamed OBs (or remote studios) with PlayIt Live":


https://support.playitsoftware.com/support/discussions/topics/5000094720


If you set the UK to play streams (from a private Icecast or Shoutcast server) and get the overseas PlayIt Live systems to stream to the server it works well and using computers that use a common (Internet) time reference it can sound OK.


The "now playing" metadata won't be right from the overseas contribution but if you can accept that, from my experiments it was a good solution.

 

I'm not aware that PlayIt Live has "skins" in different languages.


Assuming the software runs in English there is then the question of whether it will run OK under Windows running in a different language (which should be fairly easy to test).


I'm not sure where the "database" comes in as PlayIt Live really likes to all run on one machine (including having the library on a local drive on the machine).


If the problem really come down to centrally held recorded programmes being downloaded to local machines under a common schedule with local inserts (trails, adverts, idents etc.) that seems likely to work.


If something in the schedule fails, PlayIt Live can be a bit tricky (but I believe that isn't a feature unique to PlayIt Live) however sensible setup and a good degree of testing could mitigate this.

 

Thanks for the reply, Mark.


I was thinking that PlayItManager could handle the networking side of things, but thinking it was just one database. Now I've read it again, it seems to just sync the database between different machines.


I was wanting to be able to get a remote link into PlayItLive from another country, and broadcast over a link. I notice that it handles remote voicetracking, and wondered if it also handled playing content from the UK, but voicing from abroad.


We are looking at link-ups, which is the reason for wanting to have a non-English interface.

Hi John,


Your best option would be for PlayIt Live to run the station in the UK and remote users to voice track in. You would not require PlayIt Manager unless you intended on running multiple studios, like a second live studio or a production studio.


With regards to a non-English interface, this is non-trivial. There are 1000s of text strings that would need extracting and then translating (so far, as requested, into Portuguese, French, Spanish, German, Dutch and Italian). The layout of the application would also need to be flexible to different text string lengths - compound German words are a particular example of this challenge. It also adds a significant burden to testing as one would need to test the interface in every language to ensure it looks good. You are not the first to require a translation of PlayIt Live so it is something that will be considered for the future, but not in the short-term.

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