For as many days as I can maintain it, I'm going to try to make an entry every day about a musician I love. To keep it all webloggy, I'm going to limit it to musicians that offer their MP3s. Other than WREK, this is how I find out about new bands nowadays. I was going to start with the one I like most, but since this is a new weblog, I'll hold off and present one I just found a few days ago.

The Kropotkins caught my eye while looking up Mulatta Records for WREK. They have Dave Soldier (of the Soldier String Quartet), and !!Mo Tucker!! of the !!Velvet Underground!! in the band. Wow! Mo used to live in Georgia, maybe she still does. I downloaded the MP3 of their song Sissy Wa Wa and I've listened to it 30 times in the last few days. It has a skip-rope cadence, funky guitar and bass, and just plain rocks. I must find out more about this band. s contained a song from our rotation plus an announcement of what it was, group, album, etc. The voices were grouped and colorcoded and (ideally) all the same voice throughout. So, you'd load up 50 carts of one voice, matching genres to the current format. When automation was running, it would play a cart, then cut to a reel, then back to a cart, then to a different reel. Because the voices were the same, it approximated a DJ doing a shift.

This was typically done overnight, during breaks or finals week, or other times when manpower was scarce. Because Georgia Tech has no communication/radio and TV type major, WREK has almost no one who is looking to radio as a career path. This is in stark contrast to our psuedo-rivals Album 88, the Georgia State station. Because they are manned by radio/TV students who are burning to go into the music business, they have a much easier time manning the place. There is a waiting list to get to do the 2-6 AM Sunday AM shift, something that WREK can't fill to save their lives, especially not with a live person spinning records. So, with automation you could set it up by loading carts, sleep while it ran and if there were problems an alarm would wake you up. This helped alleviate the manpower situation.

Somewhere around 1997 or 1998, the chain-driven cart changer broke and was deemed unfixable. This immediately meant the death of automation as they knew it, which then caused a domino effect of failures throughout the organization. To do an overnight required one to not sleep so as to spin CDs and records, so people stopped doing them. When unmanned, the station would hit the power button and go Off! The! Air! This seemed not to bother folks, who just shrugged, but it made my head explode. I couldn't seem to explain to folks how incredibly loserish this was, and why any reasonable listener - after turning to 91.1 and getting static enough times - would stop turning there.

Fast forward to May 2001. I get laid off from my software engineering job on a Thursday. The next day, I begin work on the new automation system. Luckily, a team of us who were tasked with rebuilding it had spent that spring discussing the requirements and design. The day I became available to work on it, I started turning the requirements into a design that met them and doing all the things I normally do as a software engineer. I did all this for a complicated group of reasons, with a mix of altruism and selfishness.

• I wanted WREK on the air, all the time
• I wanted it sounding good with the wonky format all its fans love
• I did not want to sit around the house moping about being unemployed, and this kept me working (albeit without pay)
• It allowed me to write things on my resume that I wanted there, like Oracle and PHP experience
• It made me feel cool.

A very brief overview of the system: The heart of it is Audiovault, an electronic digital audio management tool for radio stations. The raw songs, promos, PSAs, etc are recorded in this. I redid their database to better scale and allow for definition of songs, automation, etc. I built a management system in PHP that lets them handle records, program them, add songs, etc. Through a cool COM object, Javascript on a web page allows one to press a button and load up Audiovault with the correct information. Finally, I built a Java process that takes the "business logic" information from the Oracle database, the "physical inventory" information from Audiovault and correlates it into a coherent library. At that point, it knows what songs it has, what formats they are, when they've been played, etc. A scheduler then fills out a 24 hour chunk of the schedule, playing ambient cuts at the right time, mixing it up for the diverse formats, playing IDs at the top of the hour.

Because my work philosophy involves having something that does anything as soon as possible (rather than having a system that doesn't do anything until it can do everything, which is freakishly common) automation was on the air doing test shifts in less than 5 weeks from project start. It had engineering problems, but it could do the basics of scheduling songs and playing them in June of 2001. Through a summer of hard work developing, digitizing and doing basically every aspect of this project, I left them with a system that is robust and good. It sounds great, and unlike the old chain driven affair, almost never has problems. It is so stable that by adding some stuff at the transmitter shack, automation can run the station without a DJ. In fact, other than an hour after a lightning strike last week, the station hasn't signed off since April. This is so essential to rebuilding lost listenership, and now they have 24 X 7 operation, nearly for free. As a listener I love it. I can get in my car at 7 AM and there they are, providing me pygmy drums and free jazz. I love it! Not only does the station sound great and operate fulltime but I think I did the best engineering work of my career on it. I'm still doing it, in fact.

Here are some cool links associated with the station.

Listen live via MP3 streams

See the most recent songs automation has played (that's right, the automation playlists are on the web while live DJs are not.) This is a good place to see the demented brilliance that is WREK. This morning around 8 AM, a Chicano version of "Sugar Sugar" segued into a folky guitar thing into the Residents. That's pretty typical of what you get in the night and weekend formats.

See the most recent albums programmed

That's enough for now. Check them out. Later, I'll even tell you the story of the race to become the first radio bitcasters.