mAirlist is my favourite playout system in the € 100,00 - € 250,00 price range for home users. It has a huge amount of features, a great looking customizable interface and it is amazingly easy to use.
In this series of articles you’ll find step-by-step instructions to configure mAirlist to work with your D&R mixing console. The articles are written specifically for the D&R Airlite, but will probably work for other D&R USB mixing consoles as well. This series focusses primarily on the live assist features for self-op studios. Non-stop features, music and advertising scheduling are beyond the scope of this first series of articles.
Series Contents
Todo.
Introduction to mAirlist
mAirlist is a very affordable premium broadcasting system created by Torben Weibert. Torben started development in 2001. With over 20 years of development, mAirlist is built upon a very mature, stable playout engine.
It contains all features you might expect from a professional playout system: A built-in streaming encoder, VST-plugin support for audio processing, live assist and automation mode, scheduling and voice tracking. mAirlist also contains some pretty unique features for software in this particular price range, including great out-of-the-box support for D&R mixers, a fully customizable and skinnable user interface and an awesome, touch screen friendly multi tab cartwall.
mAirlist Editions
mAirlist has 2 main pricing tiers: One for commercial use and one for personal, non-commercial use. Each tier contains multiple editions, where each edition offers a different subset of all available features. Custom licenses are also available, allowing you to pick and choose exactly the features you need. All editions are combined into 1 installer. The dynamic license activation (see below) activates your purchased subset of features. The feature matrix on the ‘mAirlist for Home Users page’ provides a detailled overview of all features.
Downloading mAirlist
You can download the installer from the mAirlist website. Just click the ‘mAirList [version] Setup’ link. This contains all editions, including a fully functional 30 day trial of each edition.
Installing mAirlist
Double-click the downloaded installer to start the installation process. This is a very simple ‘next’, ‘next’, ‘finish’ type of installation, where you can accept all default values.
Activating the (trial) license
The first time you start mAirlist, the license manager is automatically shown. If you have already purchased a license through the website, click ‘Download/Activate’. If not, click ‘Activate Trial License’ to start your free 30-day trial.
When activating the test license, you can select which edition you’d like to evaluate.
mAirlist Main Application
The main playout application contains a playlist, two players (A & B), an empty cartwall and the recycle bin where playlist entries are sent after playing (don’t worry, off course the tracks aren’t really deleted). The layout of this application, including the location of all items, the fonts, colors etcetera is highly customizable.
The mAirlist suite that is installed on your computer contains multiple applications. There are separate applications for playout, scheduling, database management and configuration.
Configuring mAirlist
Configuring mAirlist takes a bit of getting used to, since there are multiple applications involved. When starting out, this might have you searching a bit.
mAirlist Control Panel
From the Main Application, you can click ‘mAirlist’, ‘Control Panel’ to open the Control Panel.
The Control Panel shows a subset of all configurable options that can be changed while the main playout application is running.
Not all features can be customized from the Control Panel though. Some settings can only be changed by using the dedicated ‘Configuration’ Tool.
mAirlist Configuration
To open the Configuration Tool, first close all running mAirlist instances. Than use the Windows Start Menu to open ‘Configuration’.
mAirlist Configuration contains al settings from the Control Panel and adds settings that can only be customized by using the Configuration Tool.
