Public Radio Exchange

Big Improvements to PRX Audio

Matt posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 | Blog

The PRX Development team has been working for months on some monumental changes to how we handle audio.

To Infinity and Beyond…Audio files are big, really big. The increased popularity of PRX means that we now have over 15,000 pieces and more than 4,000 hours of licensable audio content. A catalog of this size takes up a lot of space and the tech team at PRX has worked very hard to permit the catalog to grow to a near infinite size. We’re proud to announce that PRX will never run out of storage space! So dig into your archives and upload all those good stories that you have collecting dust.

Better Communication about Your Audio…Producers are adding more than 5 hours of radio content to PRX every day, content that we need to process and prepare for Stations to audition and license. It can take a while to process that audio content and occasionally things go wrong – the audio wasn’t recorded at the right frequency, the bit rate was off or the audio file posted to PRX wasn’t even an MP2. Up til now you were left in the dark about what might have gone wrong. Now when you upload your audio file to PRX you’ll be informed at every step of the process. Did you upload your piece an hour ago and your audio files still aren’t ready? Check your messages, PRX will send you a message informing you that we received your audio file, if the upload failed or if we couldn’t process your audio file.

I Want my PRX Piece…A BIG win for producers. You’ve uploaded your audio files to PRX and now you need access to YOUR MP2 and MP3 files, the images and promos for the piece that you can’t find on your hard drive. Great news: Now, once you’ve created a piece listing and added all those assets on PRX, the files will be available for YOU to download. It’s your stuff! No more emailing Nick or Adrianne and asking for access to your files.

We’ve also fixed a number of user reported problems and added some other improved bits here and there. Tell us what you think, send an email to help at prx dot org and make some more suggestions.