More findings and then I'll call it a night. Outputs do operate differently than in Zara. If you make a change to the output device, it does NOT take effect until you restart the program.
But it does remember the output device properly, unlike Zara. So, one more reason to use it.
I still have to try out events, as our programming relies heavily on these working properly. But so far, it does look promising.
I agree that switching to this(Salamandra) isn't going to be different from Zara in my useage. But I still can't see it in English! Even on the site selecting the USA icon I can't get a sample of it all in English. Just to see I downloaded in my regular use computer and after the set up just to see the layout and I could delete after but I still couldn't see it in English and for some reason it didn't display for me to see. Didn't seem to actually set up installed.
We'll, I'm not going to fix what ain't broke so I'm sticking with Zara.
I just went to the English section of the github page and downloaded the latest release. It was in English.
The program appears to have the same type of playlist files that Zara has - m3u's, rot's, etc. It doesn't seem to want to import Zara event files (.evt files) - in fact, it uses a different suffix for event files (.sche or something like that). I'm wondering if there's a way to import Zara events; otherwise, one would have to laboriously reenter all events, which would be a real pain and error prone. Granted, it would be one-time only, but the only real issues I've ever had with Zara are programming errors in events.
I'm following this exploration of Salamandra with great interest. While I am not ready to undertake a radical and hasty changeover to a new system, I am considering the idea of opening Salamandra as an adjunct to Zara, so that I can take one step at a time in moving operations from one to the other. Like Mark, I am still finding Zara dependable and even my recent clash over inputting from the 'Satellite' feature, is settled very comfortably with the workaround I discovered, which turns out to be very manageable.
I also found Play it live very good but the two drawbacks I mentioned, Not accepting a back up set up to a new computer and having to have a license key or a redownload meaning the program has to still be in existence and the event programming is not as simple. Zara also makes multiple copies of itself. A feature Johny Cole told me about.
@artisan-radio No it dosnt import Zara event files. You have to make a new one.
@johny-c That's what I thought. If I do decide to experiment with it further, I'll run it in parallel with Zara for a while.
@artisan-radio I just bit the bullet and redid my event file. Mine has 83 entries.
@johny-c Mine has around 50, but it's growing shortly. I just worry about errors creeping in, which is why, if I do decide to move forward with it, I'll run it in parallel to make sure everything is OK. It doesn't take much to screw things up - when I changed a bunch of stuff the last time about a week or so ago, an AM became a PM by accident, and interesting things happened.
@artisan-radio It can happen so easy, when I redid mine I only mucked up 2 so wasnt a big disaster. Im realy glad I changed over. Every windows update. Zara would loose all its settings and stuff up the events. I had to delete a registry entry and then restart Zara and redo the settings to make them hold.