The Future of the JAWS Scripts for StationPlaylist.

In writing this blog post and announcement, I am somewhat reminded of a Parallel set of circumstances occurring at the moment with an app which many blind people use.

During the past 10 years, we have offered the StationPlaylist scripts for JAWS at an extremely low financial value, and in recent years, no value at all. Indeed, the scripts for StationPlaylist have always been the product with the lowest price.
We've been very glad to do this principally because we use the scripts ourselves heavily and have a passion for producing high quality radio. Further, we wanted to help other blind people who equally enjoyed broadcasting as much as we do.

However, in recent months our company has had to make some very hard financial decisions due to rising costs of facilities and services used. Given that the majority of our other scripting packages usually incur an annual cost of some kind, we need to take the same approach with the StationPlaylist scripts. I will now go onto explain what this means and the implications of it.

Let me start out with the most important point. Noone is going to stop you using the existing scripts. They will be there on the web site to download for as long as they can be sustained. If there comes a point where they are not usable with an upcoming JAWS release, that may need to be addressed. But that is most unlikely.

However, if you would like to take advantage of new features, bug fixes and other improvements, it will be a requirement to pay for the annual subscription. This will particularly be important when the new release of StationPlaylist is to be released later this year.
A major update to the scripts is almost ready to go. That does contain new features and changes. It will be released at the very start of May 2024. This will be the first release forming part of the annual subscription.

The cost of the annual subscription is £30 per year which is approximately $38 US.

Let me conclude by restating that if you do not wish to pay the annual subscription, you can still use the existing scripts. You can also still be part of the StationPlaylist scripts Email list. However, if you require technical support outside of the Email list, together with script updates and features, you will need to be part of the annual subscription.

If you wish to purchase the annual subscription and to receive the first major update, you can do so here.
https://www.hartgen.org/studio

Alternatively, an invoice can be sent to you which you can pay using PayPal, or any major credit or debit card.

We do have a system in place which will advise you by Email when your subscription starts and to be reminded when it is next due.