Rivendell aims to be a complete radio broadcast automation solution, with facilities for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. As a robust, functionally complete digital audio system for broadcast radio applications, Rivendell uses industry standard components like the GNU/Linux Operating System, the AudioScience HPI Driver Architecture and the MySQL Database Engine. Rivendell is being developed under the GNU Public License.

Doc Searls: Whose idea was this? (The company's? A station's?)

Fred Gleason: It basically arose as a sort of synergy between John Ehde (Salem's Senior VP of Engineering) and myself (at the time, Chief Engineer of WAVA in Washington DC). John had been wanting to "adopt" and standardize an automation system for a couple of years, and I wanted something Linux-based, as all of the existing proprietary systems ran only on Windows and had all of the problems inherent in that platform.

DS: How did it get rolling?

FG: The whole thing jelled at a company-wide meeting of engineer and programming types at Spring NAB in 2002. We did what amounted to a big focus group to determine what an automation system needed to do to optimally handle the sort of programming Salem often does (long-form talk programming). The original Rivendell design arose directly from those discussions. A few months later, I was transferred from WAVA to the corporate payroll and started work on the project full-time.

DS: I assume you and John were into Linux already. What were your backgrounds there? Did you come from other Unix platforms or what? (Everybody's story is different.)

FG: I had been running it since late 1994, when I came across a book called Running Linux at the local MicroCenter store. Back then, I was your classic CE [chief engineer]--a hardware guy, looking after transmitters and cart decks. I had taught myself C programming as a teenager (on a Commodore 128) but had never really done anything with it professionally. Linux revived my interest in the software side of things, to the point where I eventually ended up teaching myself C++ and Qt. So, when the time came, it was just sort of natural that I'd undertake something like Rivendell.

John, on the other hand, has no *nix background at all. He just knew it as an OS that had a great reputation for stability and reliability, something the Windows systems we were using at the time were notably lacking (this was the NT 4.0 era). John is a good friend, and it says something about him as a person that he was willing to trust me (someone with no academic qualifications in computing whatever) to pull off a project like this.

Somewhere in his writings, Eric Raymond talks about this sort of thing as a more general phenomenon: a "subject expert" in a particular industry that ends up morphing into a programmer in the process of implementing a FOSS solution for that industry, rather than coming from a traditional academically-trained computer science background. Rivendell is a classic case of this.

DS: How much are your stations using it? How about other stations, including stations on the Net?

FG: Salem currently has eleven stations (out of about 100 total) on the air with it. By the end of this year, that number should be close to 50. The plan is eventually to move all Salem stations to it, as their current (proprietary) systems wear out and need replacement, while all newly acquired stations get it from Day One. We are also in the middle of installing it at our network head end (Salem Radio Network, where Hugh Hewitt and others are originated), where it should be on-air by the middle of this year. You can get a sense of what a typical installation looks like from this "virtual tour" of our Seattle facility.

As for other stations, I don't have an accurate count, but I know it's on the air (both web stream and terrestrial radio) because I get feedback from those users all the time on the project mailing lists. My impression is that it is particularly popular in Europe and the UK.

DS: Does it address the complex Internet broadcast music reporting requirements of SoundExchange in the U.S.?

FG: Yes. It is capable of generating music reports for SoundExchange directly from the database of aired songs.

DS: Do many Internet-only stations use it? Can you say which ones?

FG: Do a search of the list archives. You'll find lots of references.

DS: The guy who wrote to tell me about Rivendell said he saw it as a replacement for RCS.

FG: That's a fair assessment. It's in the same class as many of the radio automation products--ENCO, ScottStudio, Prophet Systems, just to name a few.

DS: He added, "All we need now is a decent scheduler (like an OSS analogue for Selector) and the whole radio business gets much more interesting."

FG: Yes, this is the point of critical need in the toolchain right now. I see folks looking for a scheduler on the project lists regularly. Part of the problem is that music scheduling, when done correctly, is as much about the *data*--song titles, beats-per-minute, album art, etc.--as it is about scheduling logic. A FOSS app can provide the logic, but for the data you're still going to end up either licensing an existing database (big $$) or compiling one yourself (big-time labor-intensive). There has been some recent discussion on the project lists about undertaking some of this under some sort of CC license--it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

DS: Any guess at how much money it saves stations?

FG: The figures I've seen indicate an up-front savings of 50-75% over comparable "proprietary" (in this case, ENCO DADPro32) systems. This is with both hardware and software costs factored in. Support savings are even greater, as ENCO support involves a hefty annual fee. And, of course, no license tracking, malware or patching costs to worry about.

DS: Are Salem stations generally using Linux and open source? Got some examples? (We love success stories.)

FG: It varies widely by site. Some use it for their entire server infrastructure (Samba, Sendmail, Apache), while others are only just now getting their feet wet. A significant development has been in the small but crucial (for us) area of talk show call management, where CallCommander is being used extensively.

DS: Is there support for tie-ins to Web pages? (Listing, for example, programs or music being played.)

FG: Yes. Rivendell has a feature called "Now & Next" that is capable of sending data about current and upcoming events to external devices (such as web servers and RDS encoders). I know of at least one site (non-Salem) that is using this to update player messages via Icecast.

DS: How about for podcasting, using RSS and enclosures?

FG: Rivendell is capable of generating and uploading the MP3s automatically. Direct generation of RSS data is currently not supported but is under discussion and will probably be added eventually.