All About Automation

Since DJs will soon be heading home for the holidays the KXUA air waves are about to dive headlong into hours or even days of automation, I feel like we should discuss exactly how the miracle of automated programming works. My first goal when I became production manager was to overhaul automation. It was a complete mess. A couple thousand songs indiscriminately had been loaded into a 100 gigabyte hard drive, and were chosen at random with an out dated promo or two thrown in for good measure. One to two hour blocks were chosen by the system at random and our listeners were subjected to the same unbearably random loop of music till a DJ decided to show up for their shift. It was really easy to tune in to KXUA and tell that it was automation because no one in their right mind would play a bluegrass Collective Soul cover.



Well, the potential for a good system was there, but for some reason had never really been tweaked. Automation works like this. It's a javascript (or a list of computer instructions) that simply chooses a block of music and reports each song it plays to the website for posting and charts. The music it selected is based on a set of simple parameters within a Windows Media Player play list generator. The only parameters that were set when I started messing with were ones to prevent top 40 and cuss words from going out over the air. However, I discovered that these parameters could be adjusted to favor some tracks over others based on a simple 5 star rating system. So the first thing I did was I rated all the music already in automation. I rated everything that had been released with in the last two years as a 4 and everything else a three. Then I started adding the top three recommended tracks from every CD in heavy rotation into automation and starring them as 5. It made more sense to only add a few tracks from each CD rather than the whole thing because most CDs, no matter how good they are, only a have a few really awesome tracks. Every time we get new heavy rotation, all that was starred as five is moved to four stars and the newest stuff gets a five star rating. Then I starred all of the promos and station IDs (many of which weren't even getting played for some reason) as two stars. So the new automation looked like this:

Newest stuff plays the most frequent, 5 stars
Not so new stuff plays the second most frequent, 4 stars
older stuff plays the third most frequent, 3 stars
and show promos and station ids play the fourth most frequent, 2 stars

Well, this made automation immediately better, but I still felt like it was too monotonous. So I started looking for things I could add to make it better. For one thing we get CDs from the Ad Council all the time with PSAs, but we never used them. I think thats because some people don't like Ad Council PSAs, but I love them. So I started sifting through the ones that we were getting and adding the ones I liked into automation and starring them as 2s. Then I dug around online and found some classic PSAs and added them in as well. So now we have ninja turtles telling kids not to do drugs, and CP30 encouraging kids not to smoke. Then I realized that we could also dive into the public domain and start playing some old time radio shows and songs as well. I downloaded a bunch from the archive.org, checked them for quality of sound and added them into automation starring them as 1 so they played the least frequent. None of these old shows is longer than about ten minutes, and I think they really break up the monotony of music. I also went ahead and added a bunch of Edison cylinder recordings in as well. These are some of the oldest recordings of music ever made. You will know them by the announcement of the tune and band before the music starts on each one.



The next thing I plan to do to automation is probably to scale down some of the old time radio to just the best ones, such as X Minus One. I'm also going to add in a CD I found in the dollar rack at Hastings of one minute science lessons, which are really fun. Also, I'm thinking about finding some old radio commercials to add in as well. Anything to keep it interesting when no DJ is there. If anyone has any suggestion for automation, or an annoying song you always here it play, please leave a comment, it is an ever evolving into a more robust system.