Washington and Arlington, VA - Nov 17, 2011 - The National Radio Systems Committee (NRSC) released a new report that presents the results of a quantitative analysis on program associated data (PAD), specifically on the number of characters needed to display song title, artist name and album title fields.

NRSC-R300, Program Associated Data (PAD) Field Length Study, was developed by the Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) Subcommittee, chaired by Barry Thomas, CPBE, CBNT, vice president of engineering, Lincoln Financial Media. The principal effort was conducted within the Subcommittee's RDS Usage Working Group (RUWG), chaired by Steve Davis, senior vice president, engineering and capital management, Clear Channel Radio.

An extensive PAD database developed by Clear Channel Radio was used as the basis for this study, from which more than 149,000 program items were considered. The resulting Artist, Title and Album string lengths analyses are summarized in the report using histograms and cumulative distribution functions (CDFs). This information is applicable to PAD usage in both HD Radio and RDS systems, and will help broadcasters and receiver manufacturers understand how to best transmit and display PAD.

This new NRSC report is available free-of-charge on the NRSC website.