This page contains information on installing, setting up and configuring MetaRadio. If you need help with something not contained in these articles, please contact us directly with your query.

General Help & Getting Started

Input System Setup – Radio Automation Systems

RDS Encoder Configuration

Other Outputs

Debug Log Files

MetaRadio contains detailed debug, info and error logging. These log files are often needed by our support team when we are trying to debug issues with different third-party systems. If we request these log files, please send them via email.

You can export the log files via the MetaRadio Dashboard – click the “Export Support Bundle” button to download your logs as a ZIP file. This ZIP can be provided to Media Realm Support.

You can also manually grab these files. These files are saved in C:\ProgramData\Media Realm\MetaRadio\C:\ProgramData is a hidden folder in Windows, so you may need to enable viewing hidden files before you can navigate to this directory.

The latest log file is always called “MetaRadio.log”. At midnight, this file is renamed to contain yesterday’s date. Log files are kept for 14 days before being deleted.

RDS Formatting Strings

When configuring a RDS Output, you can enter a ‘Format String’ – this is a special field that allows you to define what text displays in the RDS RadioText field whenever a song is playing. You can enter any text into this field, but there are also two special ‘merge codes’ (think of these like placeholders in a Mail Merge).

Generic RDS Merge Codes:

  • {TITLE}
  • {ARTIST}
  • {ALBUM}
  • {DURATIONSECS}
  • {STARTTIMELOCAL}
  • {PLAYOUTID}
  • {ITEMCODE}
  • {ISRC}

Audemat RDS Merge Codes:

  • <ITEM.TITLE>
  • <ITEM.ARTIST>

2wcom RDS Merge Codes:

  • TITLE
  • ARTIST
  • STRING1
  • STRING2
  • STRING3

With 2wcom, separate each of these five strings with a “+” symbol. You can enter arbitrary text into the ‘String 1’, ‘String 2’, and ‘String 3’ fields.

Unicode Character Substitution

RDS does not support Unicode, so if your automation system contains non-Latin characters, you may ordinarily have trouble showing this on your RDS encoder.

MetaRadio now has a solution to this – we have a special conversion table which allows conversion of unusual unicode characters to standard ASCII characters.

This translation table is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Media Realm\MetaRadio\rds_unicode_replacement.txt

Each line indicates a Unicode decimal value, and the corresponding replacement ASCII character. You can edit this yourself to add extra characters, or contact us for assistancewith your language.

Future releases will update this file with a more comprehensive list of characters. If you edit this file yourself, please keep a backup copy.