Our guest speaker, Steve Rosen of RCS, helped us out of quite a squeeze. It seems that our scheduled speaker had to cancel at the last minute because of sickness at home. We called Steve just a few hours before our meeting and convinced him to drive into Washington and make a presentation to our group. As you may recall, we experienced our first snowfall of the season that afternoon, making the trip more of an adventure for Steve than we ever could have imagined. With gridlocked Washington traffic, Steve spent four hours driving to the meeting site.

I know many of you, who would have been at the meeting, took one look outside and said, forget it! Should you be interested in more information on RCS products, please contact Steve at srosen@rcsworks.com.

Selector for DOS is a mature product. After over 20 years of improvements, making a windows version with an equal set of features was more easily said than done. The new Windows version of Selector is a Windows application from the ground up. This means full mouse support, including drag and drop. Multiple windows can be open at the same time. Drag and drop is even permitted across these multiple windows. The new version includes all the functionality of the legacy DOS product with all the convenience that a graphical interface brings to the table.

We tinkered around with the product after the formal part of the meeting. I was surprised that it is possible to configure the program to select songs that are musically compatible and make better segues. It is difficult to imagine that, just a few years ago, radio stations programmed their music using nothing more than color-coded 3x5 cards!

RCS latest offering, Player, is aptly named. Player may be just what the industry has been asking for. A simple, virtual triple-stack cart machine. Unlike some big, overblown hard-drive based automation systems, Player is simple to learn and simple to use.

A similar product for the TV crowd is Sounder TV.

The RCS answer to an entire hard-drive based radio station is Master Control. Running under bullet-resistant Windows NT, Master Control does more than just replace tape and carts. This system offers live integration with Selector so songs skipped in one hour are instantly made available for the next.

A product that can be used either stand-alone or in conjunction with Master Control is Linker. Linker gives the programming people a power-tool for scheduling promos, liners, jingles and PSAs. While this may seem trivial at first, this tool helps quantify the value of sponsor mentions, those little value-added things that we sometimes offer to a client to help sweeten the deal.

The Burli digital newsroom is worth a close look. While busily capturing wire services and recording audio cuts in the background, Burli is a full-function editor in the foreground. Newscasters can drag-n-drop audio actualities right into the text.