A few days ago we had the pleasure of visiting one of the most remarkable installations of our software to date: the Wiener Riesenrad in Vienna’s Prater, the oldest Ferris wheel in the world, turning since 1897.
Many thanks to Teresa, whose family is the fourth generation running the wheel, and to Tobias for the warm welcome and a guided tour of the installation and the museum.
One rack, many zones
The whole setup fits into a single rack: a compact Mini PC running Multi Room Audio Player, an Allen & Heath audio matrix processor, and several Crest Audio and Cloud amplifiers. Audio travels between them over a Dante network interface. Together they serve multiple zones, with one player streaming from Soundtrack Your Brand and additional players handling local music files. Our scheduler takes care of the recurring tasks, so the daily routine runs on its own without anyone having to start it by hand.
Dante is also what lets the installation reach beyond the screen. Staff adjust the volume of a zone through the hardware on the Dante network rather than the software — the sort of thing that matters when the people working a shift need a physical control at hand, not a mouse.
It is a good illustration of something we say often: the software does not need a big machine. A Mini PC tucked into a rack is enough to keep an entire landmark running, day in and day out.
The venue currently runs Multi Room Audio Player version 5 and plans to move to version 7.
We were truly impressed. It’s not every day we get to see our software at work in such an iconic place, and we hope to be back in Vienna again soon.