Hi, I’m Manuel and I used to work in a super small family-run amusement park in Italy (til 2017).
There I created for them a solution to play different music in the different areas (4) of the park and broadcast messages to all the areas (ie: the show at place xxx is about to start or stuff like that).
I used some scripts that I wrote and a proprietary software (that was made to run a radio, but I adapted it), sadly the software is no longer developed and their computer is fairly old and - even if I don’t work for them anymore - they asked for my help to find a new solution.
Browsing trough internet i came upon this software, I was looking for something to play multiple playlist at once to different outputs, and, if possible, broadcast a message trough all the outputs. I have a soundcard with 12 outputs but I will only use 4. Will I be able to do this with Ardour? I’m doing this for free so I’m looking for someting “simple” with not so many modifications to do out-of-the-box
Short version, Ardour is not really what you want to use for this. Really no DAW is, different tools for different purposes. You could make any of them work, but less than ideal is an understatement really.
I would be looking for amusement park specific equipment and software really. You could do it off of QLab, but it may not be as simple as desired. On the open source side of things there is Linux Show Player. Manufacturers such as Alcorn McBride obviously make hardware specifically for this purpose.
Based off your comment of radio software, I am guessing you were using Rivendell for this, which I haven’t thought about in a long time, but there are other radio playout softwares out there as well that are open source these days.
Thank you guys for all your suggestions. I will look into something different! I will try qlab if i have time but they probably should try something made ad-hoc for their usage. Thanks!