What do you like best about Radio.co?
1) Everything is literally easy to use, from scheduling right through to music database management. The UI is visually great & clear so there’s no clutter or anything else that could potentially hamper your workflow about accessing whatever you want to use.
2) No extra pieces of broadcasting software are needed. Everything is practically in one place.
3) Compatible with a majority of audio equipment to get broadcasting within minutes.
4) Ease of access from devices such as smartphones or tablets so you can continue your work on the go or check to see if everything’s running ok. And as long as you have a stable internet connection, you can literally broadcast from anywhere. Super handy if you were to report on events or do a live show at a festival right through to interviewing guests elsewhere if they’re unable to come to you. In that case, trust us, get yourself a Rodecaster Pro as well to compliment Radio.co with your radio setup, especially because it’s a very versatile & powerful piece of audio equipment that’s portable enough that you can take it on the go with you to those kinds of events & interviews. Sure, it’s expensive but you’ll thank yourself for investing in a piece of kit you can have around for years since RODE aren’t releasing a follow up to the Rodecaster Pro anytime soon, even though it was released in December 2018 & there have been major beneficial updates to it in terms of firmware over the years. Plus, radio stations & enthusiasts are still buying these because of how popular it is with nothing else coming close to how good it is to use & the top-quality audio you get from it.
5) The platform provides very useful & understandable analytical data to judge station performance. Especially a very handy automated report for this as well that gets emailed to you on a weekly basis so that you can see where the peak listenerships are & take advantage to drive up more listeners with more content that seems to be going down well with the audience at those popular times on whatever day of the week.
6) Radio.co’s support team are always helpful & knowledgeable, especially from our personal experience so far. The individuals that you’ll likely be speaking with on a regular basis for issues or just any questions you may have about the platform itself are honestly polite & respectful. There were a few occasions during the year since we joined up where we ran into some issues, but nothing major that has impacted our experience of using the platform. There were also delays in getting a response sometimes, but obviously, it was understandably due to Covid. Things have gotten better with this, particularly since Covid restrictions have eased & it feels like the support team are more available.
7) Pricing plan is decent & still relatively inexpensive, plus there’s room for negotiating & flexibility in terms of how much bandwidth, listener stream numbers, storage, etc that your station will need, especially in the beginning. You got the convenient option to temporarily freeze your account for a set period of time if you’re unable to carry on broadcasting due to financial restraints & then pick things back up where you left off once you feel that you’re able to carry on broadcasting your station again. However, you have to resume your account to keep all the hard work you’ve done within the set freeze period, your station gets removed after that & you’ll, unfortunately, have to re-apply again.
8) The stream quality is great & you can very easily embed your online player anywhere or share to social media platforms where the station’s & the presenter’s followers can quickly access to tune into your stream. You can even design your own schedule widget to embed on your station’s website which is super handy if people want to check over the span of 2 weeks what’s available to listen into.
9) Web building is through Weebly, which is attached to the platform’s dashboard to access and is very easy to use to set up your own webpage for your station in no time at all. Same for the app builder for Android & iOS. There’s plenty of tutorials on how to get started & how to use the creative tools to design something that fits with your radio brand’s image, colours, etc. (if you’re going for the app builder feature, you must sign up to a Google & Apple developer account. But don’t worry though, because it’s easy to understand with step-by-step instructions given to you on how to get your app on the respective store platforms via an automated email by the Radio.co team once your app passes the developer review phase)
10) This isn’t platform related, but it’s worth pointing out that if you do run into some issues during your experience with the platform, then visit their YouTube channel, which has a variety of videos that range from software compatibility problem-solving, educational & training tips for presenters, help & advice on how to make your station a success as well as very handy reviews of broadcasting related equipment on a regular basis. It even has video contributions from the founder of Radio.co – James Mulvany, which are useful & a worthwhile watch as well.
11) The great thing about it as well is that it’s presenter friendly which makes it easy for them to understand & jump on to broadcast their show in minutes. The main dashboard that they can see even gives a countdown timer on the day that they’re going to broadcast their shows & tells them how long they got until they go live.
12) Presenter Show Promos get shown up in a very neat way via the metadata on the online player as well as the apps so that the listeners can know who they’re tuning into at any time of the day. Plus, this helps to further promote your talent, which they’ll appreciate.
13) There’s a lot of creativity to be had on the platform, which is pretty amazing & blew us away with how much we can get done in no time at all, simply because of how easy they have made everything to use. It genuinely feels like we could spend hours on it, and one of the best features is that if you’re away doing whatever & you leave it idle on any part of the dashboard, it’ll actually pause it so that you save bandwidth usage. Big props to Radio.co for implementing something that might be considered minor, but really smart though. More stuff like this please! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Radio.co?
1) Dark mode would be a nice welcome edition, especially if you’re managing a busy station which practically needs to be handled mostly around the clock, so having this as an option to select in the settings as a theme changer would lessen the strain on the eyes in the evening time when we particularly do music database management, scheduling changes, uploading pre-recorded shows, etc.
2) The metadata can sometimes be hit or miss, but in our experience, it’s been thankfully more hit than miss. Radio.co are working hard on a solution to fix this since a small number of stations including ours have been affected. (we’ll re-edit this part of the review to reflect when that solution is eventually implemented) It’s basically when the presenter’s promo show picture doesn’t get displayed when that show has connected to the station & still displaying the previous show’s picture metadata. The feedback we brought to Radio.co about this is have the live show that connects next on the schedule to always take priority even if the previous live show finishes over their set programming time. This way, it entirely avoids having to reset your station off & back on-air again to get the next metadata to show up correctly especially because it’ll affect what’s displayed in the apps too. But in that space of time when you’ve done that, you could potentially have lost listeners or have an annoyed presenter to deal with when you shouldn’t have to which can lead to losing talent because they’re relying on you to fix these minor issues. The solution we have on our station for the moment while Radio.co are trying to fix this metadata issue, is by telling our presenters to finish their shows before the next hour begins. This depends on how long of a show your own presenters are doing but ours do 2hr show slots & are required to finish between 1hr 59mins to just before the next hour begins so that the metadata has enough time to change over to the next show’s promo picture when the that presenter connects to the station at their scheduled programming time.
3) This is more of a “what we want to see added that would be really cool to have” sort of thing & that’s having a Tweet Deck style social media posting suite which would be extremely convenient to have since it’ll negate having to sign up to anywhere else that provides that service or having to laboriously do it yourself on the presenter’s behalf if they don’t have access to the station’s social accounts to do it themselves. Having a dedicated suite for this would alleviate so much grind because if you’re already working on the dashboard then it’s handy to have something like that in the same place rather than having to switch over to another tab where your Tweet Deck work is. One less tab open, means less tab clutter, especially if you’re trying to work in a very efficient way to get posts out on time.
4) Again, this is more of a “what we want to see added that would be really cool to have” sort of thing & that’s a Myriad style playout suite where you can essentially broadcast from the dashboard instead of having to use other play out style software such as Virtual DJ or whatever else. The dashboard already gives an option to build playlists so why not go the extra mile so to speak & add in a proper broadcasting section akin to Myriad? It could be possible that Radio.co are working on something similar that they can implement as their own special something that’s not too far removed from what people have used elsewhere in terms of playout software brands. Put it this way, it would be an ultimate all-in-one package where you have just one place to go for practically everything.
5) Some sort of proper ducking feature would be nice since it doesn’t seem to work even when you use a music play-out software like Virtual DJ. It should automatically duck when a presenter talks, but the talk still gets drowned out by the music even though the setting for ducking is set originally to 80%. We’re getting around this by doing it the classic manual way on our Rodecaster Pro. It’s not a huge gripe but could be looked at as something to improve so that it can smartly recognize when a presenter’s talking while another audio channel is active despite whatever music playout software from your PC/laptop that you’re using.
6) It would be cool to see a visual roadmap of the upcoming developments & improvements of the platform just so it gives clients like us an outlook of features that could be coming as something to look forward to or even plan ahead for that can impact your station in a positive way.
7) You have to get used to talking with Radio.co’s support team via their online chat & through emails. There’s no number to call despite the fact that it’s always nice to actually speak to someone regarding issues. But again, it’s not huge a gripe because we understand why they want to have things like this because it avoids a needless call centre type of system so that they can spend their time more productively on improving every facet of the platform. And besides, while you’re waiting on them to reply back, you can just get on with your work in the meantime & that’s what we do, which isn’t a problem for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
