Radio is still the most powerful method of disseminating news and educational material to disadvantaged groups and in areas with high poverty, fragile technological infrastructure, and/or instability. But while radio is extremely effective, the tools available to most community stations are very limited in function. The LiveSupport project, based in Prague, seeks to address this by giving stations an open source, end-to-end solution for managing a radio station.
LiveSupport is the first free and open radio management software that provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system. They have also understood that such software is worthless unless it is backed by support - and a simple way to maintain it. I've been impressed by the first betas, all of which are posted on the website
As in all Campware products, LiveSupport software is language independent: virtually everything in the user interface can be translated into any language using Unicode. Multilinguality is implemented on all levels of the user interface as well as for the metadata for audio files in the storage system.
LiveSupport has been designed for a Linux environment, but it was built it on top of standard, cross-platform classes. Such an architecture allows for easy porting of LiveSupport to different operating systems in the future.
In short, expect interesting developments in this sector from these guys in the first quarter of 2006.
