When Animals Attack (the Station)…
So a lion came in and broke our equipment…..not really.
At WVUR, we pride ourselves on running the station in a very professional manner, much like any other commercial station you would hear in a big market. But, sometimes, things don’t always go as planned.
We use an automation software called PSI. It’s basically like a computer-generated playlist that assigns commercials and sweepers and legal IDs to the proper times they need to play, as well as adding the correct type of songs to fill in our hours. Our DJs add and remove songs from our rotation as they please, but PSI is the backbone of the stations’ professional sound.
We have two main computers that run PSI; one is in the production room adjacent to the on-air studio while the other is IN the on-air studio. The one in the production room is where we load all of our commercials and music. We then send those to the on-air computer and it sorts all of the information we send. It then divides it up and plays it at the proper times. Unfortunately, a piece of hardware inside of the on-air computer went kerplunk. Which now leaves us with no on-air automation software.
This is one of the more difficult I have faced in my time as Program Director. Our job is to program the station through our software. Now without it, I have to program the station through humans, which is a bit more difficult. It’s hard to get 60+ DJs on the exact same page as to what we need to do to solve problems like these. But I’ve been very pleased with my on-air staff with how they’ve handled it. For now, I’ve given them free reign to play whatever they want to and we have “sold” it as MARCH MADNESS WEEK! Sometimes in radio, you have to take what you didn’t mean to do and make it seem like you meant to do it all along.
Because we load all of our music and commercials to the production room computer, we are able to play all of our saved files straight from there. So when there are no DJs, we are still able to play our entire music library. We are waiting on a replacement computer to run our software, but until we have that, we’ll keep making it work with what we have.
Signed,
Adam Amin, Program Director