RadioText Pro

What it drives

RadioText Pro owns the two fields a listener actually reads on the receiver: RadioText, the long line that normally carries artist and title, and Station PS, the eight-character name display. It takes the now-playing information the automation system already writes and pushes it to the RDS encoder itself, rather than depending on the automation system's own RDS output to get there.

The song comes first

Between track changes the RadioText line is worth more than a repeated song title, so RadioText Pro rotates the station's own messages through it — a legal ID, a promo, an appeal, a sponsor line. The current song always takes priority: a real track change appears immediately and interrupts whatever message happened to be showing, and the rotation alternates back to the song between every message so the music still dominates the display.

Station PS

Station PS can be a single fixed name or a set of entries, either alternating one at a time or scrolling. The eight-character limit is enforced rather than quietly truncated, because that field is fixed at eight characters in the RDS standard and anything longer is a decision about what to cut, not a detail to leave to chance.

Managed from a browser

Messages, rotation order, mode, and timing live on a web admin page, not in a file on the transmitter-site machine. Station staff change the on-air text themselves, and the on-air process picks it up on its next poll with nothing to restart. Local copies are only replaced on a successful fetch, so a network problem between the studio and the site leaves the last known good rotation running instead of wiping the display.

Built for the transmitter site

The on-air component is a small service that watches the automation system's now-playing file and talks to the processor's RDS control port directly. There is no database on the transmitter side and nothing to import, so the failure modes are limited to the two things that matter: the file and the socket. It runs unattended and recovers on its own.

See it work

The interactive demo is the same control panel a station uses, connected to a simulated receiver rather than a transmitter. Add messages, switch between alternating and scrolling, change the timing, and watch the display respond. It is a sandbox with no link to any station: nothing is saved, and nothing goes on air.

Status

RadioText Pro is in development as a product for other stations. The system is already running on a working FM station, which is where the field limits, rotation behavior, and encoder handling have been proven on air.