Pro Tools in a Radio Station? Possible?

[Raven]

Hi,
Is anybody out there using Pro Tools in a networked setup in a Radio station? How can PT be networked with an On Air Automated Workstation?
Thanks in advance.

[NCM engineering]

I use 5 ProTools NT workstations on a fiber channel SAN. They interface with our ENCO workstations via ENCO's software, DropBox. DropBox is authorized to see one of my Digi fiber drives. ENCO picks up the spots from that drive. We title the spots the ENCO cut number, and they dump right into a playlist.
THIS IS ALL THEORY.
Problem #1....
No one in our production dept. uses it. They record real time out of ProTools into ENCO. It saves the bounce to disk time, being nearly real time anyway....but they give up one A/D, D/A. Their response, "no one can hear that on the radio anyway".
#2....
The protools SAN does not work on windows NT. period. We are working on a fix, but untill that fix is working....headache. This is on win NT only. Studio Solution has some stuff that they say works wonderfully for the mac. The one guy that looks the most promising is: http://www.studionetworksolutions.com/
Speak with Gary. He knows his stuff.
#3....
When I get the SAN working on NT, the production staff will not be willing or able to learn it to a level that will make it useable or eficient...
#4
If you are doing any networking of any type....no matter what anyone tells you....It will not be Digi approved. Keep this in mind.
Feel free to swing by and check out our pad. We are in Seattle. We have 5 Protools/procontrol studios, a pile of aux studios, and 6 on-air studios...It is a pretty cool place. We built it from the ground up, and have been here about a year.
shoot me an email if your interested.
[email protected]
Kelly.

[MacDaddy WGAR]

Before our recent move to new facilities I had two Mac versions running with filesharing on the tcp/ip so we could move sessions from studio to studio.

New place we have 6 Macs with three stations and more to come, and I need to find time to get the guys set up so we can share our stuff. Is that what you are looking for?

We are running NeXtGen by Prophet and it is totally incompatible, It is not even compatible with itself! [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img] We actually wouldn't want to be hooked up to it anyway even if it was possible way too buggy.

[ August 09, 2001: Message edited by: MacDaddy WGAR ]

[Raven]

Thanks folks. On Mac or otherwise, if PT workstations can be on a network with the actual On-Air Automated Workstation it will be great. Can somebody give me an idea about the workflow?
Thanks

[Doug Ring]

Hi Raven, do you want to play stuff to air direct from Pro Tools using triggering software or somesuch? Because I don't know if that's supported.

We use filesharing on a server for people buiding programmes - they create on a local hard disk in the workstation, then port it over to the server for storage. They can then get it back from the server to the next machine at a later date. It's handy for producers to rough cut in a workstation, then the engineer picks the project up for fine-tuning in the studio. We used to use removable drive caddies, but had so many problems with them. This way is far more stable, and eliminates fragmentation (as long as you remember where your most recent version is - I have accidentally overwritten a later project with an earlier one!)

This probably doesn't answer your question, but proves you can fling projects down ethernet...