The Media Realm newsletter went out this morning. It featured some recent articles from this website, as well as some interesting tidbits from around the internet. Here’s some of the highlights:

  • Have you seen XPADxpert? It’s a free tool to decode and analyse PAD metadata from a DAB or DAB+ mux.
  • Logitek have been building a virtual radio console in Australia. Now, they’re building a software-based audio codec (again, it’s being built in Australia!). Both of these were on display at SMPTE 2017.
  • Did you know the Axia xNode can act as a small audio mixer? The control protocol is available, and people are starting to integrate with it. Obviously it lacks processing capabilities, but it’d be handy for lightweight tasks such as remote location mixing.
  • SCA has seemingly completed their metro-market rollout of RCS Zetta. Here’s a photo of Maestro playing out logs for the last time on Fox FM Melbourne. By the way, Zetta now has proper support for Custom Fields! Hooray!
  • Australia’s Community Broadcasting Foundation just allocated $1.9m worth of government grants, on top of the $14.2m allocated in June. If you’re interested, check out the detailed allocation spreadsheet (& June) to see what people are spending money on.
  • Radio Magazine has released the results of their 2017 Radio Engineering Salary Survey (USA-based). 47% of respondents work as freelance engineers in addition to their full-time radio engineering work. 58% of respondents are 55+ years old.
  • You may have used the Internet Archive to find old web pages, but did you know you can also search through millions of old books? There’s thousands about broadcast engineering.
  • Did you know the price of the Blackmagic Design SDI/HDMI Micro Converters recently dropped? This isn’t strictly radio-related, but lots of us are now getting into video production.

If you want to sign up for the newsletter, you can do so here.