Well, you could if you bought a second carousel...but don't worry---I only worked for cheap GMs, too.
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Automated formats other than Beautiful Music
- Thread starter gr8oldies
- Start date
Mentioning cassette automation, the most unique I saw was two cassette carousels, each holding 24 cassettes. The homebrew format was recorded with the typical tones and several single deck cassettes were used for 'currents', commercials and liners. All cassettes were Maxell UDXL II tapes but I don't recall if they were C-60s or C-90s. It was pretty much a lite rocker and it sounded pretty good.
I saw an FM automated with CD decks. It seems it was a typical automation system modified for a huge number of CD decks (all were 6 CD decks) that had the entire music library ready to roll. Commercials were on CD as well and station IDs on cart in what I think was a 48 slot 'insta-cart' (two rows of 24 cart slots). I want to say this was at the FM in Dickson, TN.
I have seen stations that operated on cassette for DJ assist. The worst was a small town station that had cassettes with 24-26 minutes of songs. The format was simple play one side of a cassette, then play spots and do weather, PSAs and such. Thus, the average hour was 25 minutes of music, 5 minutes of spots and such with the next cassette started at :30 to roll until :55 when more spots and such filled the next 5 minutes. Needless to say the station didn't do much and eventually shut down. It didn't sound good as the control room was a Radio Shack microphone, three or four dual deck Radio Shack cassette decks and a pair of Radio Shack mixers. Processing was a store bought unit. The station operated from a farmer's field in a little old mobile home. This was the 1980s and I doubt they ever billed more than $5,000 a month sold for whatever rate a client was willing to pay...50 cents to a dollar mostly.
I saw an FM automated with CD decks. It seems it was a typical automation system modified for a huge number of CD decks (all were 6 CD decks) that had the entire music library ready to roll. Commercials were on CD as well and station IDs on cart in what I think was a 48 slot 'insta-cart' (two rows of 24 cart slots). I want to say this was at the FM in Dickson, TN.
I have seen stations that operated on cassette for DJ assist. The worst was a small town station that had cassettes with 24-26 minutes of songs. The format was simple play one side of a cassette, then play spots and do weather, PSAs and such. Thus, the average hour was 25 minutes of music, 5 minutes of spots and such with the next cassette started at :30 to roll until :55 when more spots and such filled the next 5 minutes. Needless to say the station didn't do much and eventually shut down. It didn't sound good as the control room was a Radio Shack microphone, three or four dual deck Radio Shack cassette decks and a pair of Radio Shack mixers. Processing was a store bought unit. The station operated from a farmer's field in a little old mobile home. This was the 1980s and I doubt they ever billed more than $5,000 a month sold for whatever rate a client was willing to pay...50 cents to a dollar mostly.
Yep. It's that or a "B" reel every week. We could play "hitbounds" during our 2 live assist shifts. Eventually songs that fell off the chart were added to a recurrent reel. (There was a day we were off the air for an ice storm so I spent my shift making reels.
Century 21, and I assume a lot of the others, rotated 2 current reels (also rotated announcers), so the hotter rotation was on both reels, the chart climbers and droppers on one. (To this day, when I hear "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder I want to go change a reel somewhere).
And that reminds me that the last automation system I ever saw (not counting stuff that's totally digital) was in Phoenix---a station with an old-school automation controller, two carousels for commercials and six CD jukeboxes holding however many discs those held. This was in the mid-90s in Phoenix.
I saw a statistic that at one point in the late 60s about 50% of the licensed radio stations were automated, using some form of national music programming service, either from Bonneville, Schulke, TM, or Peters. It was a huge business. Somehow there's this myth that before consolidation, all radio stations were live and local. The facts say otherwise. My take is that if consolidation had not occurred, we would still have seen an expansion of national syndication. The only difference would be who owned it.
A lot of automated stations (especially B/EZ) went live when they transitioned out of the format into AC or whatever. So the number of automated stations (especially in major and large markets) took a dip in the 80s and 90s.
But in 1984, you had an explosion of new stations because of Docket 80-90. A lot of those stations needed cheap content. As this thread indicates, there were other formats available besides BM. The two satellite companies had been established by then, and once they had marketing help from United Stations and ABC, they replaced the tape delivered serviced. Computer technology improved during that time as well, replacing the old solenoid switching. Then you had VT that was developed at Capstar in the early 90s. I'd guess the percentages weren't as high as they were in the 60s, but there were thousands of stations that used satellite and automated content. Plus you had the rise of programming consultants in the 80s and 90s. So you might have local programmers, but they were getting assistance in what they played from national consultants. This was most evident in the rock format.
Easier is what I did for WQII and WZNT in Puerto Rico: use IGM Instacarts. Our currents, about 24 songs on each station, loaded in individual decks and the jock carts loaded in matching decks. One person watched the systems for both stations and loaded the matching voice tracks for each shift.
The jocks updated the intros weekly with several cuts for each song. The rest of their time was spent at station promotions and events and recording promos and other things to be inserted in the jock slots in the automation.
This was the late 70's.
Sure you could. For example slots 1-9 could be A rotation and the rest B, then just program the automation to play the A slots more often than the Bs. You didn't have to play the carousels sequentially. We did that at a station I worked at in the late 80s where overnights were automated. The 7-mid jock (yours truly) was responsible for loading the IGM.
I shudder to think what would happen if the VCR tape got chewed up in the player, and no one around to pop a new one in. 😯
I'd think that was maybe more likely to happen in rewind or fast-forward, neither of which would happen during playback. For a six hour shift, it's just a simple play at the slowest speed.
I had VCRs for 15 years and I don't remember ever losing a tape the way I did with audio cassettes early on.
At the end of the day (literally), the VCR was cheaper than having a jock cover the shift. The station was on an absurdly tight budget, going up against an 86,000 watt monster across the street with all the money in the world. We got really, really creative when it came to stretching the little money we had.
CD automation... where I worked we made many of the CDs used. Those were used as well as the ubiquitous HitDiscs and GoldDiscs. Stations would have a bank or two of these (apparently ubiquitous) Pioneer CD players, which would use a six CD cartridge, giving a station nearly a library of music with just six or eight CD players (I can't remember how many CD players the system would use).
They Pioneer CD players were used because they were one easy to procure, and were a reasonably priced, programmable CD player. They all were controlled by a smallish computer operated box, that acted like a switch. All controlled by a DOS PC.
The same box could also be used for tape automation.
It's kind of strange talking about it, I'm sure tape automation lasted 20-30 years or more, but the CD automation was the thing for only about 10 years at most. By the time the lasers on the CD players wore out MOHD was already here.
They Pioneer CD players were used because they were one easy to procure, and were a reasonably priced, programmable CD player. They all were controlled by a smallish computer operated box, that acted like a switch. All controlled by a DOS PC.
The same box could also be used for tape automation.
It's kind of strange talking about it, I'm sure tape automation lasted 20-30 years or more, but the CD automation was the thing for only about 10 years at most. By the time the lasers on the CD players wore out MOHD was already here.
Reload was always so much fun. I imagine we could have done that.
I don't recall losing an audio cassette but I've had several VCRs go bad and have never figured out how to get the tape out.
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