Letter From DAD…

NAB and New Products Exciting Product Introductions! By now you may have heard about Presenter, our completely new automation and playout system designed for live and live assist radio broadcasting. We introduced Presenter at the NAB Show in Las Vegas last month to rave reviews. One of the things that current DAD users told us they liked the most was that you can add Presenter to DAD, giving you the best of both worlds.  And right now, as a special thank you and incentive to DAD users, you can save 1/3 off the normal upgrade price to add Presenter to a DAD workstation!   What else have we been up to?   We’ve added support for Twitter and FriendFeed to our PADapult and RAMA in our latest release, version 9.0a, allowing your station to ‘Tweet’ as well as send RDS, HD Radio, update station web sites and more.   If you have colleagues who use a different automation system but would like to upgrade to DAD, we have good news for them as well.  This month we announced the Intelligent Conversion Engine (ICE), which makes the process of converting from a third-party system much easier and pain-free!  And due to the uncertainly many people are seeing in the automation industry (other than ENCO!), we’re offering ICE at no additional charge for stations buying new DAD or Presenter systems.   Don’t forget to join us on our Facebook group, and watch for our next newsletter next month.

One More New Product From ENCO The Button Box Grows Up! Introducing HotShot,  an instant audio playback package…with some big differences!  HotShot is a solidly built complete hardware appliance with a full screen interface.  HotShot is quick to learn, easy to use and flexible enough for any broadcast application. Let’s start with flexibility.  HotShot can be used with a mouse, touchscreen or our custom designed HotShot button pad.  HotShot has 8 banks of 84 buttons (quick access to 672 audio buttons).   It features a full screen interface, so there’s no windowing or dialog boxes to deal with and nothing between you and your buttons.  The HotShot control surface is pre-labeled with color coded letters making it easy to correlate the button you press with the audio you want.  No longer are you faced with a sea of ‌ white buttons; with HotShot, navigation is easy. The HotShot control surface is unique to ENCO Systems.  It’s a solidly built (metal case), USB device using high quality switches designed to be reliable and last a long time.  Bank buttons light up to show you which bank you are in, regardless of where you change banks from, the surface or the screen. HotShot is capable of playing as many as four streams on as many as four outputs for a total of 16 audio files playing at the same time!  Outputs are assignable by column and displayed on the screen.  Sure, you might not need that kind of capacity every time, but with HotShot, you know you’ll always be able to do anything you’re asked! HotShot supports dragging audio files directly from any folder of your PC: local drive, thumb drive, CD/DVD, portable hard drive or network drive.  HotShot even supports an autodetect mode that can preload banks with audio files found on any inserted media, giving you immediate access to a number of portable audio files just by plugging in!  HotShot supports uncompressed PCM or MPEG2/MP3 compressed stereo and mono audio files. HotShot is delivered in an attractive and space efficient 1 rack unit enclosure with 250 gb of storage, mouse and keyboard.  A monitor is not included, but HotShot supports anything with a minimum resolution of 1280×1024. HotShot is the ‘button box’ appliance that is ready for today’s control rooms, today’s audio suites and today’s broadcast trucks.  It’s the perfect combination of solid hardware and reliable software that delivers both ease of use and real value.  Take your best shot, with HotShot!

Being Connected A Note From Matt Walther, ENCO Technical Support In today’s times being connected is a must. Now more than ever, facilities are bridging networks together allowing access to the outside world. While many still choose to keep their automation system isolated from the Internet, more often than not, these systems are connected. With this enhanced connectivity, risks become a concern. One of the most common threats are Viruses. Viruses have become very sophisticated over the past few years and can quickly scan the entire network, find another workstation and replicate. These worms can mask themselves to look like legitimate services and a local administrator might not even know that they are infected until performance related issues arise.   These threats can perform tasks such as spamming, execute Denial of Service attacks and download additional malware, wrecking havoc on any system. Most will use the computers resources such as memory and network bandwidth for their own cause without regard for legitimate applications. Often when calling Technical Support one of the questions asked is if we can connect remotely. This means that the workstation has to be able to see the outside world. Before putting any system on-line, one should always make sure it is secure. There are many different ways to secure a network and there is simply no way one method will protect all sites. Each facility must review their own security protocols and determine which is best for their needs. One of the most common lines of defense is a good Anti-virus program that has been properly configured. In regards to running an anti-virus program on a DAD workstation, one should do so with some caution. In general one should disable complete scans as real-time scanning is fine. Disable network scanning along with firewalls and e-mail scanning. It is recommended that at a minimum, one should create an exception for the DAD, CUTS and TEMP directories. Ideally, one would focus the exceptions to .DBF and their associated .CDX files in the directories listed. WAV files can also be excluded. In regards to Virus definition updates, one can allow Automatic updates as long as it will not interfere with the overall network stability. Even if a system is ‘isolated’, give attention to the workstations that have an indirect link. A traffic workstation on the house network might have a connection to the automation network to transfer logs. In this case, the Traffic machine is a point of entry and should be protected.  Likewise, if one uses a computer with an USB drive, that computer should be protected as the jump-drive is a point of entry. Overall, the best protection is to keep a system isolated. When connectivity becomes a necessity; one should always consider using some sort of protection.