Radio News Hub provide news bulletins to radio stations around the world. Bulletins are provided via a synced Dropbox folder.
Please contact Radio News Hub if you are interested in incorporating their content into your broadcast.
To get started, set up a free Dropbox account and share your account email address with Radio News Hub.
Radio News Hub will ask you to connect your Dropbox account. This allows them to dispatch the bulletin audio files to a Dropbox folder.
Once you allow Radio News Hub to access your Dropbox, when the next set of bulletins are dispatched, a folder called 'RNH-bulletins' will appear in your Dropbox.
On your PlayIt Live computer, install the Dropbox desktop app.
and sign in with your Dropbox details:
Step through the installer, selecting Make files local. Once complete, a folder will be created called C:\Users\<username>\Dropbox. In this folder, you will see the RNH-bulletins folder.
The RNH-bulletins folder contains multiple files that need to be kept in sync within PlayIt Live. To accomplish this we will use Monitored Folders to watch the folder and import any new files that appear in the folder.
In PlayIt Live, first, create an empty Track Group that will be used to add the Radio News Hub audio into. Go to Manage > Track Groups, click Add New and select Listed Track Group. Call the Track Group "Radio News Hub" and click OK. Click OK on the Manage Track Groups window.
To create a Monitored Folder go to Manage > Monitored Folders and select Add New. Click Browse and select the Dropbox\RNH-bulletins folder. Note that you can ignore that it says "No items match your search".
Tick Analyse cue points when a track file is added and Re-analyse cue points when a track file is updated and select Radio News Hub folder to add the new tracks into. When new audio files are found in the RNH-bulletins folder they will be automatically added to the Radio News Hub track group.
Your monitored folder should look like this:
Click OK and then OK again in the Manage Monitored Folders window.
The RNH-bulletins files will now be imported and kept up to date in the Radio News Hub track group. You can view this under Manage > Tracks and filter to the track group Radio News Hub.
As you can see, the titles of the files can sometimes be messy. You can tidy these up within PlayIt Live by double-clicking a track, e.g. business. Below I have updated the artist to Radio News Hub and the title to Business.
Repeat this for each of the bulletin items. This only needs to be done once.
Note that you can bulk edit tracks by selecting the first item, holding SHIFT and selecting the last item. Then clicking edit. Below I have edited the Type to News and the Artist to Radio News Hub.
These tracks can then be scheduled at the start of a clock. To play the news at exactly 00:00 you should place a xx:00:00 Hard Fixed Time Marker at the start of the clock. It also sounds great to have station imaging before the news.
To create a clock go to Manage > Clocks > Add New. Here is an example clock with the news and weather surrounded by station imaging.
Clocks can then be scheduled into specific hours by going to Manage > Clock Schedule.
On the main interface, click Log Scheduler ON and the items will be scheduled into the playout log at the times you desire.
When news is updated by Radio News Hub, the audio files will automatically be updated by PlayIt Live when they arrive in the Dropbox folder.
To play the news over a bed (background music) set the Cue Out point of the "News In" track before the news to the start of the bed and select No Fade on the track. This will mean the next track will start playing but the previous track will not fade and will play to completion. You should edit the bed audio in an editor such as Audacity or Adobe Audition so the level is low enough that the news audio can be heard over the top of it. You should also ensure the bed part of the track is shorter than the overall news tracks - this ensures that the bed does not continue to play into subsequent tracks.
Thank you to Durham On Air for supplying the imaging used to test this workflow.