We had staff night out on Saturday night. I say “staff night out”, it was more six of us in the pub round the corner having a few drinks.
We laughed, we joked, we all commented how great the evening presenter between seven and ten is, we drank and I got constant reminders every 10 minutes that I was supposed to be on air at six am the next morning.
And then we got to about twenty to eleven and there was a sudden realisation between me and a colleague that a very important piece of work had been forgotten about. There had been crossed wires. He thought I was going to do it, I thought he was doing it. Essentially in twenty minutes time the playout machine was going to hit a stumbling block.
Every song that goes out on air is carefully selected. The computer picks a whole load of music and the programme controller goes through it and chops and changes bits as he feels appropriate. But the computer doesn’t do this picking the music automatically, it has to be told to do it first, and that was the bit we’d forgotten about. As a result the eleven to twelve hour was music-less.
Now at this point you are probably thinking “how unprofessional and careless”. But it wasn’t a massive problem as the system that handles the playout of the music should randomly pull music in to fit and everything should sound fine… “in theory”. But the computer doesn’t listen to songs, it just knows them by name.
When done manually, all the songs are chosen in the correct order to sound good on air, so there is no extreme opposites. Eminem followed by Aled Jones, that sort of thing. (we don’t play either of those artists, that was just an example). The computer can’t do that. As a result the following hour could be a very spiky and ever so slightly obscure listen. Equally the computer could happen to select a perfect mix of tracks. Could we trust it?
Even after a few drinks we had decided no, we couldn’t trust it. It runs on Windows for a start. Now with fifteen minutes spare alarm bells were ringing, what would we do? And after a few minutes pondering, I asked another one of my colleagues if I could “borrow” their IPhone. Another few minutes had passed and I had downloaded a free application from the App store, and I’d managed to remember the remote login details and hey presto, we were sitting in the pub round the corner with the music scheduling system for work in front of us.
By the time eleven o’clock came, music was coming out the radio and everyone in listener land would be none the wiser that the music had been chosen from the pub.
And I know what you are thinking “a night out, and you end up all crowding round an IPhone trying to schedule music for your radio station sounds a bit boring”. It was actually a fun game, trying to work out what decades songs came from as not to break any of our music policies.
I may have been a bit hasty having a dig at the IPhone in the past. It saved the day on Saturday and could be a serious contender for my new phone when my contract comes up for renewal in a few months. Although there is a new offering from Nokia on the way, and I’ve been eyeing up Blackberry’s recently to. It’ll be a close call.
