Students develop software for FM radio

With FM radio catching up, five engineering students have developed a software 'Music on Demand', which will help radio stations broadcast live music programmes in order to meet the demand of listeners for playing songs immediately.

Under the present system, the radio broadcasters or Radio Jockeys on FM radio stations have to scan through for the requested songs manually in their music libraries resulting in most programmes being broadcast after their recording.

The software has been developed jointly by Atul Gupta, Institute of Engineering and Technology in Bhaddal, Kangan Arora and Bhavna Rai, both of Shaheed Udham Singh College of Engineering and Technology in Tangori, Saumya Jain, Punjab Engineering College and Sadhna Nagpal, DAV Institute of Engineering and Technology in Jalandhar during their six week training at the SLR InfoTech in Chandigarh.

The software catalogues of all the songs as per the requirement of the user on the basis of singers, language, timing, etc.  The song can be instantly selected and played by filling in the parameters even while the announcer chats with the listeners, Kangan Arora said.

The software developed by the five students under the supervision of the director of SLR InfoTech, H.S Chawla has been made in VB.NET as front-end and ORACLE9i as back-end.

The five learned these languages for 4 weeks and made the project in 2 weeks. Arora said they have given this software for broadcast of live music on demand programme as a gift to the local FM station of the All India Radio.

This 'Music on Demand' software is very much user friendly and satisfies all the security measures, she said adding that they would soon get their software registered.

Arora said that with the use of the software, the announcer need not manually search for the song in the radio station library, a process which now takes a lot of time.

"With our software, the announcer or the presenter has just to feed any of the details of song which could be played in less than 5 seconds as per the request of the listener.

AIR Station director K C Dubey told PTI on Wednesday that the software developed by the five students had been analysed by the engineers of the local station.  "They have opined that the software is useful for them," he said.

Dubey said that for using the software the songs have to be loaded on the hard disc of the computer. The local station would soon load the songs on the hard disc; he said adding it was soon proposed to commence live music on demand phone in programmes.

"The software would be of great use for the (radio) station to originate music in the live programmes on the request of the listeners," Dubey said.

He said the station was in the process of starting new programmes as the reach of the programmes produced here has reached other states, including Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh as the Prasar Bharti Corporation of India has started relaying the Chandigarh FM programmes from the high-powered Kasauli relay transmitter.