[cr-india] First release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System v0.1 is now here!

[Arti Jaiman]

Dear Adi
Congratulations. Hope to see a working demonstration of GRINS soon.

Regards

Arti

Arti Jaiman Project Manager: TRF Radio | arti at trfindia.org | www.trfindia.org | www.jaiman.org | www.pitara.com

--- On Thu, 11/6/09, Aaditeshwar Seth <aaditeshwar at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Aaditeshwar Seth <aaditeshwar at gmail.com>
Subject: [cr-india] First release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System v0.1 is now here!
To: cr-india at sarai.net
Date: Thursday, 11 June, 2009, 11:48 AM

Dear all,

Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available
for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter
Networking System :D

GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations.
Built on Gram Vaani’s MINP platform, the current release of GRINS
allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview
programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive
semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be
enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS
messages, and Internet connectivity to share and stream content with
other GRINS deployments. Some of the key features of GRINS that
distinguish it from other radio broadcast platforms are as follows:

* Commodity hardware: GRINS does most processing in software to
eliminate the need of buying expensive audio hardware, and yet imposes
very low processing overhead on the system. For this reason, GRINS can
be run off commodity PCs and single board computers, significantly
reducing the costs of setting up community radio stations.

* Service oriented design: All functionality provided by GRINS is
handled by different services, such as the Audio Service for playout,
Archiver Service for recording, Library Service for storage, etc. Each
of these services can be run either on a single machine, or off
multiple machines. This makes the deployment of GRINS extremely
flexible to be able to fit into any kind of a radio station setup.

* Application development platform: The open API of GRINS allows third
party developers to build their own radio applications using the
various underlying services that GRINS provides. For example, you can
build specific applications for the broadcast of educational programs
or health programs, that allow quick search and playback features for
the respective topics. In the future, once GRINS begins to support the
telephone, video, and Internet planes, these applications can even be
multiplanar in nature.

* Easy to use UI: The GRINS user interface has been especially
designed keeping in mind the target population of rural areas in India
and other developing countries. The use of large icons and simple
navigation makes GRINS easy to use even for radio operators who are
new to computerized systems.

* Diagnostics: A key feature of GRINS, the system can actually detect
any network faults or audio cable errors or poor audio quality through
Digital Signal Processing (DSP), and guide the operators on how to fix
the problem locally. This reduces the down-time of the system so that
radio stations located in remote rural areas do not have to wait for a
technician to visit them and fix small problems.

Please navigate the following links to know more about GRINS:

* Screenshots, and download/installation instructions: http://gramvaani.org/docs
* Configuration wizard to understand how GRINS can be plugged into
your existing radio station setup:
http://gramvaani.org/docs/webconfiguration.html

And do visit the Gram Vaani website to stay updated on our progress:
http://gramvaani.org

regards
The Gram Vaani Team
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