Lawo’s Rǝlay Virtual Radio Mixer software is now being made available through www.r3lay.com, operated by California company Modulation Index.
‘Radio engineers have been watching IT, and acknowledging the benefits of virtualisation,’ says Lawo Director of Virtual Projects, Michael ‘Catfish’ Dosch. ‘IT professionals choose software running on COTS computers because it scales easily, can be administered remotely, and costs a lot less than racks of dedicated hardware. Radio understands that software virtualisation can reduce the cost of building radio studios too, while providing remote troubleshooting and easy scalability– advantages we’ve haven’t had until now.’
‘When we began talking about Virtual Radio software, Greg Ogonowski was one of the first to contact us about partnership,’ he says. ‘Naturally, we jumped at the chance.’
Greg Ogonowski – formerly VP of Product Development at Orban and now President of Modulation Index, maker of StreamS Live Encoder software – says: ‘When I saw Lawo’s Rǝlay Virtual Radio Mixer, I knew I wanted to be their partner. Lawo has a vision of radio studios built around versatile, easy-to-use software running on commodity PCs. That’s my vision, too, because the combination of off-the-shelf computers and software-based broadcast tools is incredibly powerful and cost-efficient compared to the traditional way of building radio studios.’
The first Modulation Index product to be sold through www.r3lay.com is nCode, a version of the StreamS Live Encoder package featuring professional HLS/MPEG-Dash streaming with adaptive multiple bit rates, and available only to Rǝlay clients.
Lawo VRX4 and VRX8 Virtual Radio Mixer software enable broadcasters to integrate studio mixing console functions with other software tools, using common studio PCs that already host playout systems, codecs and VoIP phone apps. Combining the studio mixer with other audio apps in a multi-touch environment gives talent a single point of focus to use in controlling all aspects of their shows.
Lawo’s Rǝlay encompasses line of Virtual Radio tools for in-studio use, including Rǝlay VRX4 and VRX8 Virtual Radio Mixer software, VPB Virtual Patch Bay software and a VSC Ravenna/AES67 Virtual Sound Card driver for Windows PCs.
