Welcome to the army of our customers famous Jeff Keith. Jeff is the Senior Algorithm and Product Development Engineer at Wheatstone Corporation. Wheatstone’s Audio mixing consoles, processors, and studio systems are designed specifically for the demands of broadcasting. They cover a wide range from smaller single-station studios to large multi-studio, multi-station complexes with a million cross-points and dozens of mixers, talent stations, and elements connected across a region.
“Attached you will see a picture of my audio processing lab at Wheatstone. What I’m currently running are 16 instances of Winamp, eight each on two PCs. I spread the players out over two PCs for two reasons: (1) Winamp gets CPU hungry when running more than about four instances and (2) it makes it easier to see, get to, and navigate the different playlists. Each Winamp instance plays a different type of music format (AC, CHR, Rock, Classical, etc.) and we use that material for testing our audio processors.
After seeing your MRAP program and how little CPU it was using when running eight ‘zones’, each assigned a different audio output device via our network audio driver, I’m thinking MRAP would be a much better alternative to all those instances of Winamp.
In fact, one of the things I liked best about MRAP is that you can save its configuration and it’ll use that to set itself back up if restarted! With Winamp, I have to manually start each instance, map that instance to the correct audio device, point that instance to the desired program content folder, and only then start it playing. This process is quite time-consuming as well as error-prone. In fact, over the lab’s 15-year existence, I am the ONLY person who can do this process and get it right! So… I’m thinking MRAP would be an excellent replacement for all those instances of Winamp.
I do really like how MRAP works, in fact, I was astonished to see that with eight ‘zones’ running CPU utilization was almost nothing! At first, I thought something had to be wrong, but all eight signals were there and sounded great, so GREAT WORK! And my favorite part? MRAP remembers what it was doing last if the PC is restarted, and it comes right back up all configured and running, just like before. That part alone saves a lot of time and frustration.
Over the weekend I was in the Wheatstone plant and took a picture of my audio processing lab showing the many, many Winamp instances your very nice program is going to replace (see link below).
During the 15 years, the lab has been in existence, over 3,200 people from the domestic and international broadcast industry have toured it. It’s a great advertisement for our gear and might serve as one for your software too! What a great product! Thank you for your patience during my questions and for your assistance!”
Jeff Keith
Senior Algorithm and Product Development Engineer at Wheatstone Corporation