Summer Radio Schedule - The Streak Ends
The summer semester schedule began yesterday at my radio station, and for the first time since the summer semester of 2002, I am not on it.
The last week time I was on the air personally was Sunday, March 15. Later that week we stopped letting our programmers into the studios due to the pandemic. At that point, we went to our emergency backup robot, which basically selects random songs from a curated subsection of our digitized collection. A short time later, our hardworking computer maven Isaac made it possible to assemble playlists from that digitized collection, albeit without any ability to talk during that playlist. From there, Isaac then gave us the ability to record a show at home using our own personal collection and have that be played on the air at more or less the desired time.
In short, we now have two options to do a show and one backup option.
[1] Record a complete show at home in one hour increments using only our own personal collections and upload it for playback just as we recorded it.
[2] Build a playlist from our digitized collection with no talking.
[3] If nobody does either, we go to the randomly selected backup.
Option 2 appeals to me about as much as sharing a Spotify playlist (aka, not at all). The talking and context that I provide during a show is arguably more fun than picking the music from our extensive library. So what about the option to record a show at home? There are some difficulties there as well, with one that could be easily surpassed and one that to me defeats the purpose.
- I still don't own a laptop that could handle the recording load. I could certainly buy one, as well as a good microphone, and I have a room that literally used to be a recording studio in my basement, but...
- We are limited only to our own collection for these purposes. While I may have 530+ albums, and more if I go through M's mostly unsorted CDs, in the context of a weekly radio show that's hardly anything. In the context of the genre specific show that Soul Delirium has been since Fall 2017, it's nothing at all. I could play a lot of Sharon Jones and one or two albums from an assortment of other artists, but certainly not enough to sustain a soul show for more than a month. Even the freeform would start to repeat pretty quickly, especially since I have a substantial chunk of very commercial music that I wouldn't play on my radio station no matter how much I love it personally.
Given that a substantial amount of my banter is also concert calendar based, and there are no concerts happening right now, that presents another challenge. Most of the rest of my banter is about weird things I found in the vinyl library (not possible right now) or the Encyclopedia Project (also not possible now, since a lot of the more obscure ones is only vinyl), it just didn't seem like there was much point in trying.
I fully expect this to be a temporary interruption. Our hosting university isn't doing in person classes this summer, but expects to in the fall, and it seems like it would be odd not to allow radio if students are back on campus. The executive staff is already putting together cleaning protocols and the like for when that happens. Still, I'm currently working on my longest streak of non-radio since my brief hiatus from Cleveland. On the plus side, since there's no geographic limitation to recording a show and submitting it, a great many of my friends who left Cleveland are back for at a limited return of a few shows, which is great.
And if there somehow becomes an option to mix my commentary with the digital library, then I'm in like Flynn, even if I have to shell out for computer hardware.
The last week time I was on the air personally was Sunday, March 15. Later that week we stopped letting our programmers into the studios due to the pandemic. At that point, we went to our emergency backup robot, which basically selects random songs from a curated subsection of our digitized collection. A short time later, our hardworking computer maven Isaac made it possible to assemble playlists from that digitized collection, albeit without any ability to talk during that playlist. From there, Isaac then gave us the ability to record a show at home using our own personal collection and have that be played on the air at more or less the desired time.
In short, we now have two options to do a show and one backup option.
[1] Record a complete show at home in one hour increments using only our own personal collections and upload it for playback just as we recorded it.
[2] Build a playlist from our digitized collection with no talking.
[3] If nobody does either, we go to the randomly selected backup.
Option 2 appeals to me about as much as sharing a Spotify playlist (aka, not at all). The talking and context that I provide during a show is arguably more fun than picking the music from our extensive library. So what about the option to record a show at home? There are some difficulties there as well, with one that could be easily surpassed and one that to me defeats the purpose.
- I still don't own a laptop that could handle the recording load. I could certainly buy one, as well as a good microphone, and I have a room that literally used to be a recording studio in my basement, but...
- We are limited only to our own collection for these purposes. While I may have 530+ albums, and more if I go through M's mostly unsorted CDs, in the context of a weekly radio show that's hardly anything. In the context of the genre specific show that Soul Delirium has been since Fall 2017, it's nothing at all. I could play a lot of Sharon Jones and one or two albums from an assortment of other artists, but certainly not enough to sustain a soul show for more than a month. Even the freeform would start to repeat pretty quickly, especially since I have a substantial chunk of very commercial music that I wouldn't play on my radio station no matter how much I love it personally.
Given that a substantial amount of my banter is also concert calendar based, and there are no concerts happening right now, that presents another challenge. Most of the rest of my banter is about weird things I found in the vinyl library (not possible right now) or the Encyclopedia Project (also not possible now, since a lot of the more obscure ones is only vinyl), it just didn't seem like there was much point in trying.
I fully expect this to be a temporary interruption. Our hosting university isn't doing in person classes this summer, but expects to in the fall, and it seems like it would be odd not to allow radio if students are back on campus. The executive staff is already putting together cleaning protocols and the like for when that happens. Still, I'm currently working on my longest streak of non-radio since my brief hiatus from Cleveland. On the plus side, since there's no geographic limitation to recording a show and submitting it, a great many of my friends who left Cleveland are back for at a limited return of a few shows, which is great.
And if there somehow becomes an option to mix my commentary with the digital library, then I'm in like Flynn, even if I have to shell out for computer hardware.