I started at CLC Radio as a DJ when it was known - unofficially - as WCLC.
At that time, Spring of 1976, I was starting as a CLC part-time student on
leave from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and starting up a
very small live sound recording business, recording various garage bands
to start with. I was usually asked to literally set up in my van just outside
their garage, then record their gig demos directly to cassette - not much in the
way of digital audio was available even to Large Professional Recording studios
back then, just multi-track tape machines (of which were way out of my price
range!). Interestingly enough, the a van proved a good acoustical isolation from
a closed garage - in many ways - so I also had to figure out an efficient way to
load and unload the van, especially if I would be going downtown to work, which
usually consisted of "playing" the drums. I like to call it "working" the
drums.
As a DJ, then, I soon realized that we [WCLC] were not actually transmitting
on an FM frequency, which of course I and everyone else I knew that listened to
my show in the old Building 1 cafeteria, had assumed was true ! This lie sort
of "set me off", as then Student Director of Activities, Ed Snyder, was fond of
telling. I merely told him that I was concerned that since we were not actually
transmitting, it seemed odd that we had a call sign at all, known as "WCLC".
[Back then the passive voice was often used by me.]
Ed asked me politely to "do a little research" on the matter, and I did. I
found that we, CLC, had in fact never applied for an FCC license and that the
call letters were "made up" by some student manager, whose name I have never
found in any old files. I did find in the files, however, that another student
manager would later rename the station to , simply, WLC. Apparently a TV
station was in the making? OMG, please don't get me started about Video
Production - or lack of sam - at our fine institution known as CLC!
A somewhat boring story so far, I know.
So, flash forward to 5 years ago, when I decided to get back into "radio",
as I re-started as the station's engineer-in-charge (there was no printed job
description for the position until Felicia Ganther started as our new and
current Director of Student Activities, about a year later, after Ed's
retirement). Although a veteran producer/broadcaster of WVON / WGCI fame, Rodney
Finlay, was unable to keep a broadcasting course alive (I believe he was the one
to actually get it started), due most likely to lack of student enrollment,
which is usually a minimum 6 to 12 students enrolled per semester in order for a
class to stay viable, still endeavored to propose that the student run audio
booth obtain an FM license soon, "and becaome a real station". The attempt
failed. Probably partly due to not enough student work or interest put in for
convincing Ed, who might have been inclined to "take it up the ladder", the SGA,
his boss, that person's boss, then eventually the students being asked to
present to the CLC Board of Trustees of a community need for CLC to use their
own radio station as another effective public relations tool and for the
students of CLC to hear, finally, at the mainly Freshman and Sophomore levels,
what their 4-year school friends were already hearing: The newest music before
commercial stations would play it (bore us with it?), international, national,
local and college news and events, as well as the possibility of hearing the
teams soar to victories and the university bands and choirs soar through
melodies - all what we do now on the internet at clcradio.org for CLC (I know,
cheesy plug, but I never did mind the cheese, different cheese, my cheese "being
moved", etc. [Experimenting with mice, hmm.]).
This is, so far, now all great stuff, but what about me? Was I a "good" DJ? Did I show up on time to my scheduled shows? Did I turn the volume down when asked? Every time? Or did I just let someone see me turn any old knob on the console, trying to fool them in to thinking I was actually doing something "technical", and yet receiving glad confirmation that indeed the volume had been turned down to their satisfaction - even though I had actually turned the knob for the room's light dimmer?
Yes and no.
Stay tuned for more: This story unfolds like "space unfolds due to the spice worms' influence"2.
I sure hope you weren't waiting long!
Let me now move to the current airing of CLC Radio. We stream live (as well as, now you know, having a web presence). We use Live365 (we started with them in December, 2002), then we added the web space using first DellHost and Trellix to start the design then the design went to FrontPage 2000, they then sold our account to VeriSign/VeriCenter (we upgraded to FP2002 for design), then they sold our account to AppSite Hosting at one time at least since 1997 a combined Shared/Dedicated Hosting service, then one month later, AppSite moved our account to their "sister" company - formed also in 1997 - for them to handle their huge growth in Shared Hosting - we started and still are on a Shred Hosting system with this sister company, called PureHost. After Purehost got us - June 2005 - we added Macromedia Dreamweaver to the design mix right away. We have added 2 other streaming hosters, viahosting and spacialaudio. The latter was included with a software package that we use to automate most of our music and announcements when live DJs are not present.
In music servicing we have become much more student/staff/community centered instead of radio staff favorite centered. Instead of Directing the Music in that latter direction, we opted to give each staff member instead their own showtimes so they could get the word out about their personal choice of music. This method has actually helped music direction improve, because of the testing ground approach where calls of complaint or accolade proved to us many things. One idea being,
"What do our listeners really want to hear and what time of the day do they prefer to hear it?".
Our music automation has actually let us fine-tune this main thrust in music directing. We first tried Multiple instance of Winamp running with a DJ-mixing plugin and a timer plugin, which worked quite well, but programming separate hours of music type and style (called "genre") was awful and time consuming. We later added with Winamp running as a backup, OTSDJ (later and now known as OtsJuke) and then slowly migrated to Spacialaudio SAM Broadcaster 2 - which uses a proprietary scripting language known as PAL (not to be confused with PAL/SECAM of Europe or the PAL circa 1970 !). Although OTS came with its own proprietary scheduling solution as well, I was fooled into believing that SA's PAL would be better. Well, as it turns out, the best things of OTS haven't found their way into PAL, and the best parts of SAM2 will never be incorporated into OTS. Selfish programmers all.
Of course, if someone would just write this kind of software in Delphi, we could be much the better for it, although I don't relish having to deal with arrogant, self-righteous German programmers who wouldn't know the meaning of Customer Service if they had a PhD in.......Customer Service! (Everyone knows that German computer language programmers love Delphi) Most of us tolerate "gol"'s occasional frolic through the Forum Forrest if we own FruityLoops. Enough said on the subject of programmers with an attitude. Don't think I am being to harsh on the gol-master - he just never developed the social skills beyond programming, bow-hunting, ninja, and computer hacker skills, and I mean that in a good, Dynamite way.
1 :Please leave; you are not ready, grasshopper...
2 :from Dune, both versions