Working with different digital signage applications has been really interesting and rewarding.
My experience with both Scala and Onelan digital signage had sparked an interest in how we could use the software and hardware to work within a commercial background music environment. Considering they are built to manage visual content rather then sound.
Digital signage is great at scheduling visual content to play to a specific time then change to another piece of content time specific and so on….
But when it comes to sound you can not change from one music playlist to another right on time without finishing the song that is playing from the first playlist.
Let me explain…. you are in a bar and the mood is changing from day trading to late afternoon. The mood needs to move up a notch to encourage people to stay and enjoy themselves. The music playlist is scheduled to change from a relaxed feel to a pumping house playlist right on 5pm.
Imagine if at 5pm the relaxed playlist was half way through a song then BAM… a pumpin song starts playing. That’s not cool!
The rewarding bit! In my role with Soundmark Solutions I was asked to find a background music solution that can do all of the many styles of scheduling we needed without cutting off songs, is online for music updates, ease of use for client log ins and have the capacity to run visuals and dynamic editing of menu boards.
I discovered that the majority of digital signage applications had you locked into paying for their expensive hardware/players to use their software. After extensive research and testing I am extremely happy to say that we are using a Campaign Manager with licensed software and the freedom to use any hardware/players. It’s very exciting to be able to offer our clients an Android or Windows solution depending on their budget and requirements.
At first the Campaign Manager software was designed to manage more digital signage then background music. Extraordinary to say but I was able to work with their developers to make some changes toward background music and now we have a great background music product with all the benefits of managing visual content.
This is a really cost effective solution for any commercial business needing the right music playing at the right time, visual promotions on TV screens, scheduled in-store audio announcements and commercials, multiple menu boards and even getting “The Ode” to play right on 6pm… The list goes on!
There is so much we can do with this little unit. Contact us to find out how you can get one in to your place of business.
