WVUR Management Blog

Yesterday I started work on upgrading our website from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5.10. This would be like whistling (really easy) for me, except for the fact that our server is not directly writeable. We have to upload to a stage server which then syncs with the live server every even hour.

I got the new version of joomla installed and now the template just needs to be modified to look like the old one.

Training has started with next year’s webmaster, Chris Kleinhans-Schulz. He’s a quick learner and he can come up with some goofy dummy-text — a skill needed by any webmaster.

For now things are going well. Let’s hope the end of this year and next year goes well.

Jeff Lange Webmastering joomla, Webmaster

My job for the last few weeks has been refreshingly different. I have taken advantage of the studio computer being repaired to clean out the catalog of productions in PSI. I went through and re-timed and remastered over half the sweepers, and added around 10 new ones, so when the on air studio goes back on air, there is going to be a lot of new sounds for the station.

One thing that I am really looking forward to is the installation of the new Prod room computer. Jared, the station engineer, is in the process of putting in a new, totally awesome computer that I cannot wait to start playing with.

I’m also excited to work with the new management staff. punks.

I you have any question or comments just let me know!

Peace

Harry Cassin, Producion Director

Harry Cassin Production, Uncategorized Computer, promo, sweeper

Organizations on campus are a way for college students to develop close bonds with other students with similar interest. WVUR is one of these organizations and often staff members spend so much time together, they begin to think of each other as family.

As some of you might have heard, a former manager and close friend of many involved with the station, was recently injured in a serious accident. Nick Kovatch was hospitalized for about a month with severe injuries. Thankfully, Nick has recovered and was released from the hospital to continue his recovery in the confines of his home. The station staff and friends of Nick are overwhelmed with joy for his recovery and would like to assist him with the expenses that have accumulated due to his hospitalization.

WVUR will be putting together a couple of events to help raise funds for Nick and his family. The first event will be a basketball tournament to take place at 2 pm on May 3rd in the Hilltop gymnasium at the Athletics Recreation Center. The tournament will be 3 on 3 and the cost will be $15 for a team. Teams can have as many as 4 players to allow for a substitution for each team. Teams can be any combination of players, just be aware that some all female teams may be matched up with an all male team as the tournament progresses. Brackets will be decided based on sign ups. Sign up sheets will be located on the station door and should be turned in by Wednesday, April 29. Every team is guaranteed two games and there will be other fun competitions throughout the day. Prizes will be provided for the winning teams and donations will be accepted throughout the day’s events.

Please keep in mind that all proceeds will go to Nick Kovatch and his family. Please join us for a day of fun for a great cause. We appreciate your participation.

If you have any questions please contact Michelle Niehaus at Michelle.Niehaus@Valpo.edu

admin Events

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

admin Uncategorized Adam, Problems, PSI

As of late, Twitter has been the talk of the town with newspapers, television shows, blogs, and even late night talk show hosts providing a ton of commentary on the hot web service.

We’ve been all over the hip new service and you can catch a ton of WVUR staffers/DJs on the social network. We’ll be updating about WVUR and whatever else we’re doing quite a bit, so be sure to give us a follow.

WVUR - Our Station’s Account

Cameron Banga - General Manager

Adam Amin - Program Director

Dave Schroeder - Sports Director

Chris Zaplatosch - Assistant Music Director

Allison Kuehner - News Director

Jeff Lange - Webmaster

Harry Cassin - Production Director

Eric Hockman - Digital Music Director

Lilia Oakey - Promotion Director

Jeff Greco - DJ

Kati Schmidt - DJ

Chris Salani - DJ

Jon Becker - DJ

Robbie Onofrey - DJ

John Dimmick - DJ

GrecANDSchoeck - Show with Jeff Greco and Mark Schoeck

Cameron Banga Uncategorized

Awesome title I know, but let’s focus.

Today I had my first office hours after spring break, and they went about according to plan. That is if the plan was that our printer wouldn’t cooperate with my every wish and the audio drivers on the prod room computer developed schizophrenia over the break.

I was trying to print the weekly prod room sign-up sheet for everyone to use, but with no avail, hopefully we work things out soon and there will be one up before the week has passed us by.

I had to fiddle with the audio drivers in Audition because I was recording things off of the internet, namely an entire Daft Punk sound board. I used these sounds in two new sweepers I made, with more to follow. I think I am going to begin more series of sweepers to keep things interesting. This series is called “SAT prep with daft punk”. There are two on rotation now, check ‘em out! (Notice my cool use of ” ‘ ” in place of “th”, by that logic I should be able to spell “father” as “fa’er” and “the” as ” ‘e”. we are ‘e source!)

peace

Harry, Production Director

Harry Cassin Production Daft, Production, Punk

First off, I hope everyone had an enjoyable and relaxing Spring Break. I’m back in the station for the first time in two weeks and it feels good to be back. Not going to lie, I’d rather be outside enjoying the AMAZING weather. It’s my office hours so I’m here. I just finished going through the plethora of press releases I had sitting in my inbox.

I have put together a list of Evening Source stories for next week. I’ve been trying to think of different stories that students would find interesting or something they never knew before. Besides the press releases I receive, I listen to what my friends and other students on campus are talking about and events they are putting on. Something I have been working on is following local and national stories and finding ways to make them more relevant to students and get them up to speed as to what is going on. I know that it is often times hard to find enough time to follow current events as a student between classes, meetings, studying, etc. I am open to suggestions for stories, so if you know of something going on around campus or if there is something you would like to know more about, shoot me an e-mail or leave a note in my box in the managers’ office.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Allison Kuehner, News Director

Allison Kuehner Uncategorized

In college radio, you’re always thrown a plethora of new music from undiscovered artists.  Literally once or twice a week, music director Patrick Lay walks into the station looking like Santa with a big sack of musical gifts for the WVUR family.

When you listen to a lot of indie music, it’s often difficult to understand why a lot of talented artists will never get a chance for commercial success.  Once in a while though, a band we’ve been following for a while will get a big break.  I’m not going to lie, it kinda makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know that a group of extremely talented musicians have taken a big step toward reaching their lifelong goals.

Company of Thieves is a band we’ve been following heavily at WVUR and you may remember the band from their amazing set at SourceStock 2008.  They’ve seen a lot of success as of late and we couldn’t be happier about their good luck.  Late last year they signed on with Wind-up Records and have recently seen their album Ordinary Riches re-released (pick it up on iTunes, it’ll be the best six bucks you spend all week). A couple weeks ago, they made their television debut on Last Call with Carson Daly.

Here’s their new music video for Oscar Wilde.

Congrats to our friends at Company of Thieves and can’t wait till we can get them to play at Valpo again sometime in the future.

- Cameron Banga, General Manager

Cameron Banga Uncategorized

I went into this weekend with a project on my shoulders. This project is the DJ Challenge which happens to be a rap battle created by the amazing Harry Cassin. I did not know how the previous voting system worked, so this was not good.

Jeremy Wilken, the webmaster before me, was amazing at coding. He was also was very good at training me. However, he couldn’t teach me everything he knew. One of the things that he didn’t teach me was how the DJ Challenge system worked. By my judgement, this is the most complicated thing on the website. Not only does it let people vote for things, but it plays audio and displays little bar graphs, all generated by PHP and MySQL. Before Jeremy left for Germany he gave me all of the files he had on his computer. I had to walk through the thirty-something PHP files to figure out exactly how the system worked. It’s really quite elegant and amazing. There’s a database that holds all of the votes. The voting page is a iFrame (not to be confused with an iPhone) embedded in the Joomla CMS, which allows for it to look nice and run form elements otherwise shunned by CMS.

After I figured out how every file worked, I found a wierd redundancy that brought the voter to a page that looked like the WVUR site, but was on a different server. I decided to get rid of this and just display the voting confirmation/error message in the iFrame.

I never thought I would get out of this project sane, let alone with a better solution. Please let me know how you like the voting process either by email (jeff.lange1@valpo.edu) or in person.

-JL

Jeff Lange Webmastering DJ Challenge, Rap Battle, Webmaster

Today when I sat down for office hours in the prod room, I worked on an idea that I have been thinking of for a few weeks now. Daily tips for listeners that can help them do small and manageably things to help conserve their environment. I wanted to make these informative, but entertaining. Everyone has heard all of these tips before, but I wanted to present them in a way that might help get them so stick in people’s minds. For DJs, you will see these show up in a new Promo cart, ‘GPROMO’, in the next few days.

Let me know how what you think of these when they go on air,   I would love to hear what you think. Also, if you have any environmental tips you want people to be aware of, e-mail them to me!

Peace

Harry Cassin, Production Director

Harry Cassin Production