Engineering & Technical Information

We often get asked about the type of tech we use to bring PVR to you. So this page is a deep dive into our Engineering and Technical department.

PVR is actually not a radio station at all in it’s current form. We don’t broadcast anything through the air (yet). We are what is technically called a linear webcaster, which means we send out a linear audio stream over the internet. Linear means you can’t play a show on demand, nor can you rewind or fast forward our stream. Just like normal radio, you can only listen to a show at the time it is being broadcast. We are governed in what we do by rules laid out by two rights organisations, PRS and PPL. These organisations collect royalties on behalf of musiciands and song-writers. In return for the royalties we pay, we are allowed to play musuic that is currently under copyright. However there are some rules about how often we can play a track from the same artist, how we can change a track and other things that we have to abide my.

There are two types or show on PVR. Those we make ourselves (in house productions) and those made for us by third parties (syndicated shows). The syndicated shows we play normally air overnight or at weekends. Two current examples are ‘Dickie Lee & The Iceman’ and ‘This Is Country Music’. They are pre-recorded, sent over to us in advance, then played outat the time of transmission by our ‘playout software’ from our studio at Pleasley Vale.

Shows produced in house are either made live (usually at Pleasley Vale) or ‘voice tracked’, which is a process where a live presenter records all the items that form their show in advance, then our playout computer assembles the recorded audio into the final show and adds the correct music tracks automatically.

The heart of our operation is the playout computer. It’s basically a high end pc that has been modified with a special sound card that interfaces with the Soundcraft S10 mixing desk that our presenters use during their live shows. The playout computer runs the Linux operating system and a special piece of software for use by radio stations called Rivendell. This computer stores all the music, jingles, adverts and pre-recored shows. At pre-determined moments it also downloads the main news, community news, what’s on guide and traffic and travel from outside production sources and prepares them for playout. The Rivendell software also keeps a log of which songs we’ve played, making sure we always have a good mix of music in all of our in-house produced shows.

At the start of each day Rivendell generates a play list for the next 24 hours. It decides what we pplay and when we play it. However live presenters can over ride the system and play an alternative track, for example a request sent in by a listener.

We normally try to play a broad selection of music from the 1970s to the present day, but we sometimes have specialist music shows, which are sometimes pre-recorded and at other times live. When these shows are live Rivendell can automatically select the correct type of music for the show.

Our studio at Pleasley Vale is operational 24/7, sometimes with a live presenter and sometimes with the computer playing out a pre-recorded show. It all runs through our professional broadcast mixing desk, then through a piece of hardware called a compressor/limiter which keeps everything at a similar volume, bringing quiet tracks up and taking loud tracks down a bit.

After exiting the compressor/limiter, the audio then goes into our encoder computer. This machine turns the analogue audio into a digital stream and sends it up to our streaming provider in the cloud. That streaming provider is where you connect to when you listen to PVR, either through the player on our website or via a smart device like a home assistant or internet radio.

So that’s how we do it. One of the unique things about PVR is that we use open source software and operating systems on all of our computer systems. We also use as much analogue equipment in the studio as possible, including our classic Soundcraft mixing desk. The idea is to make it as close a recreation as we can to the small local stations many of us grew up with and have now unfortunaley lost after they were swallowed up by big corporations.

Finally, just a reminder that we are always looking for volunteers to help run the station. If you’re interested in audio tech we would love to hear from you. So get in touch and get involved in your truely local radio station.