Older automation systems

[Groove1670]

We used a Harris 90 at WEOW in Key West. We watched it while we were live on WKIZ. We also had one on WKWF (it never worked right always ran fill cart) our FM was huge (WAIL) so the AM was neglected. Finally we used a MOYL feed, and wired a spotmaster five decker to the sat receiver, and changed the cart each hour, when we remembered

 

[RadioMan203]

Back in the day when I can working on a proposed Cable FM radio station I had an old Gates RC-48 systems with four ITC open reel decks. It really brought back memories as I remember the local easy listening outlet running one and cranking up the audio at home to listen to the relay click between input sources playing.

 

[Megacycler]

Century 21 in Dallas supplied the music reel to reels for many hundreds of automated medium and mostly small market stations in the 70's/early 80's. The oldies reels always had a Beetles tune last. I think the intention was partly to alert the the high school aged kid making minimum wage to change the reel after hearing the Beetles. What really happened was that the reel got changed BEFORE that last Beetles song.

 

[jh]

Century 21 in Dallas supplied the music reel to reels for many hundreds of automated medium and mostly small market stations in the 70's/early 80's. The oldies reels always had a Beetles tune last. I think the intention was partly to alert the the high school aged kid making minimum wage to change the reel after hearing the Beetles. What really happened was that the reel got changed BEFORE that last Beetles song.

We ran the Century 21 AC tapes with live announcers in the early 90s. They rarely played the Beatles song at the end of the tape, either.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

I don't think anyone mentioned this but the tones were put on backwards on the Drake tapes so they could time them consistently and perfect every time. The leading edge of the tone starts the next event and the previous event stays on till the trailing edge of the tone.

I have to admt, I never checked the reel to reel music tapes to see if there was an overlap of the audio.

With the beautiful music format, there wasn't much need to start the audio of the next event overlapping the tail of the music segment.

It has been over 35 years since I saw that system, I'm short on recalling how everything worked, timing wise, so I can't tell you how much time there was between the end of music sweep trip tone start and end, if there was any audio overlap or not. Also, the trip tone end also stopped the reel to reel tape deck.

Trivia note. Back in the days when the tapes were recorded, they were all from records. I noticed one selection cut had a skip. Luckly, the skip was one groove back and repeated the one turn of the album. I found the bad segment in the tape, and splicing block and tape, the skip was removed. the gorovve.

 

[PirateJohnny]

I have 44 Century 21 tapes. Most are 50s/60s "Good Ol' Rock & Roll". They have not printed through. I need a device/circuit to listen for the tones and trigger the next machine. And, yes, I do have decks to play thee tapes.

I worked at the station these came from back around 1987. We had four reel to reels, two cart carousels, odd/even time, weather, network and local news cart machines. All the carts used secondary tones and the reels used the 25 Hz tone to trip the next source. As long as the secondary tone was playing, the cart audio stayed on over the next source, so weather forecasts could "talk over" the intro of the next song. When this FM station went live the automation was switched over to the AM station. I ran the board for the morning news blocks and two hours of music after all that. The board was one of the "live' sources for the automation. I had a terminal in the control room so I could change the sequence on the fly. The start button also kept the live source on as long as I held it down, so I could talk over song intros. CBS radio network news was recorded on cart automatically and their trip tones would signal the end of the newscast. This automation system had to listen for three different trip tones. All I remember was the commands on the monitor were just text commands and looked like a DOS screen.

 

[michael hagerty]

With the beautiful music format, there wasn't much need to start the audio of the next event overlapping the tail of the music segment.

In fact, it was frowned upon for a long time. Through the 70s, there was an intentional half to full second pause between events on many beautiful stations. As a tight-board baby DJ, it drove me nuts.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

With the beautiful music format, there wasn't much need to start the audio of the next event overlapping the tail of the music segment.

In fact, it was frowned upon for a long time. Through the 70s, there was an intentional half to full second pause between events on many beautiful stations. As a tight-board baby DJ, it drove me nuts.

Oh, I understand. The only thing I overlapped was the jingle cart we used to go from either the weather or community events audio cuts. I just thought it was neat to roll the intro music on the jingle cuts at the end of the dry audio. I suspect I was the only person who knew the system would do the overlaps and I stumbled across it somehow, probably by accident. We had absolutely no documentation on the system.

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

With the beautiful music format, there wasn't much need to start the audio of the next event overlapping the tail of the music segment.

In fact, it was frowned upon for a long time. Through the 70s, there was an intentional half to full second pause between events on many beautiful stations. As a tight-board baby DJ, it drove me nuts.

It would have driven you nuts to listen to some of the CBC Candian stations back in the 50s and 60s. At station break time I always wondered if they had some kind of clock mechanism that allowed them to precisely meter out the silence between the network system cue and the station ID, and then another similar silence before giving the time, and another similar silence before starting the news or the next program. I had a certain sense of "majesty" about it.

I guess to some people, it was a certain sense of "stuffiness" about it. ;D

 

[johnny marks]

I remember putting aluminum foil on tapes at the china marker to activate either a stop set or the next reel. This was mid '60's.

 

[radiorob2.0]

WVLK-FM (now WLXX) Lexington has had some form of automation since they signed on the air. They inherited the Harris system from sister WHOO-FM in the mid eighties and then evolved to one of the first hard drive based systems in in the early nineties. As mentioned above it used Pioneer six disk changers for music. A fluke in the system is occasionally the brain would fire off the first cut of the disk. Since the disk were from TM Century the current disk first cuts were CHR or sometimes Urban, that stands out on a country station.

Back in the tape days the audio had the one second gap at the beginning and the tone was placed one second before the end for seamless audio. The FM was located at the transmitter site so for last second spots it would be a team effort between the downtown offices and site via a STL. Following a level check the transmitter engineer would give a countdown of "3-2-1-go", when he said "one" the engineer at the site started the cart and on the word "go" the audio would start creating the one second gap at the beginning. The tape downtown was marked with a grease pencil one second before the end of audio. When that mark would cross the playback head the downtown person would say "punch" and the engineer would place a tone on the cart.

 

[The King Bee]

The legendary WAKY-AM 790 Louisville (1958-84) listed "Sam Seeburg" as their overnight DJ as early as 1962 on their printed surveys. Can anyone enlighten us as to what this early automation system may have been...brand, model and the like?

 

[michael hagerty]

The legendary WAKY-AM 790 Louisville (1958-84) listed "Sam Seeburg" as their overnight DJ as early as 1962 on their printed surveys. Can anyone enlighten us as to what this early automation system may have been...brand, model and the like?

I don't think it was automated. From what I can find online, "Sam Seeburg" was a DJ that spoke in a pitched-up voice. Early voice-tracking, not automation....with a live board op playing the jock tracks (which online sources say may have been recorded at another McLendon station and shipped to WAKY) from either a reel, McKenzie repeater or one of the first cart decks. WAKY went with a live overnight jock within a year or so.

There's a WAKY tribute site with a "Sam Seeburg" clip...the clip plays at normal speed and then is slowed down to show what the real voice sounded like: http://www.79waky.com/audio/WAKYSamSeeburg.mp3

 

[Jody-Thornton]

Century 21 in Dallas supplied the music reel to reels for many hundreds of automated medium and mostly small market stations in the 70's/early 80's. The oldies reels always had a Beetles tune last. I think the intention was partly to alert the the high school aged kid making minimum wage to change the reel after hearing the Beetles. What really happened was that the reel got changed BEFORE that last Beetles song.

We ran the Century 21 AC tapes with live announcers in the early 90s. They rarely played the Beatles song at the end of the tape, either.

Were these similar to the "Stereo Rock" format? I heard WWSE 93.3 in Jamestown, NY playing automated tapes until the early 90s (1992 to be exact). It was the same "Stereo Rock" format, with only hits being backsold, then a recurrent, then gold for each set.

 

[Joseph_Gallant]

Today, a hard-drive based automation system would be far more versatile than anything ever possible with a tape-based system.

For a small market automated station, a creative programmer can use a hard-drive based system to put together quite a great-sounding station.

 

[Savage]

"Sam Seeburg" is reminiscent of an automation system marketed by Gates in two forms, one called "Nite-Watch" and another called "Auto-Station." These primitive systems dated to the late 1950s. They consisted of a tape machine and a 100-record jukebox transport, actually made by Seeburg (the "Select-O-Matic") which played either side of a 45 rpm record vertically. It was just like the jukebox mechanism you see on the opening credits of the TV show "Happy Days" with the "turntable" traveling on rails, scanning for the selected record and playing either side with a double-sided cartridge. The Gates system one was identical except it was mounted in a gray-steel box instead of the gaudy jukebox cabinet.)

In practice what you did was, record an announcement on the tape, then push a button which generated a 25 Hz tone. The tone simultaneously stopped the tape, cueing it (loosely) up to the next event, and starting the motor of the Seeburg unit; when the record was over and the changer cycled, the turntable motor would shut off and the tape would re-start. And so forth - over and over, tape, then record, then tape, then the next record, etc. Gates literature helpfully suggested "segue is possible with about eight seconds of dead air between plays."

The 45 player was modified with relays so that when the tonearm set down on the selected record, the motor would shut off, waiting for its next command. Upon re-start there was an audio delay relay which held off the audio for about five seconds so if the pickup didn't land on precisely the appropriate beginning point, the record wouldn't "wow" in (usually.)

I once heard one of these systems on the air on a 50kw AM overnight shift, and the tape had gotten out of step with the Seeburg changer. Every time the announcer introduced the song which had jusy played previously.

 

[Bongwater]

Sam Seeburg......Reminds me back in the 1980s, KJET 1590 AM (then an automated Seattle alternative rock station) initially named their overnight voice tracker, "Otto Pilot"

 

[Chuck]

Way back when, I was the Station Manager for KSMU, the campus radio station at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The folks at KLIF (Gordon McLendon's station) gave us an old Seeburg 100 machine that had previously been used to program KNUS-FM in Dallas. Being crafty, I figured out how to use a microswitch actuated by the tone arm to close the play contacts on an ATC-Collins tape cart machine. We took the biggest tape cart we could find and recorded liners on it. Each one started out with music but ended with just voice, which usually played over the first few bars of the next song, making a decent segue. I built a tube type compressor/limiter/mixer, fashioned after an Altec design, which combined the two audio sources. When the Seeburg got to the end of a song, that triggered the cart machine. It actually sounded pretty good. We called it the "Sammy Seeburg Show," which did overnights, 2:00 AM until 7:00 AM and day parts from 9:00 AM until 1:00 PM while everyone was in class. Usually it got more calls for requests than our live DJ's ever got. (Some of them were very good and went on to big careers in broadcasting). This was late 1969 through 1970.... I guess it was an early poor-boy's automation system.

 

[Jay Walker]

Sam Seeburg......Reminds me back in the 1980s, KJET 1590 AM (then an automated Seattle alternative rock station) initially named their overnight voice tracker, "Otto Pilot"

Ah yes...the names we came up with for our automation systems. One of my favorites was "Fred" an acronym meaning "F*****. Ridiculous. Electronic. Device." tragically aptly named because of the systems "reaction" during lightning storms when close strikes would "fire off" every source in the system all at once.

An audio "Mash-up" before "mash-ups" were considered cool..."FRED" the acronym, and/or the complete phrase would be the choice word or phrase muttered by the operator as they furiously pounded the keypad "cancel", "enter", "cancel", "enter" 16 times until the system cleared all sources...

 

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

As I recall, sometimes a station's transmitter would be given a pet name because transmitters seemed to have human qualities.... uh.... make that human frailties.

Over in the business world, I worked in or with enough computer departments to know that the same naming phenomena also extends to computers... you know the BIG ones... not these wimpy computers that fit under a desk.

I haven't looked at the lists of popular names for new babies, but based on the names handed out to transmitters and main-frame computers that were contankerous, I'm going to guess there is a name that people do not tend to pin on new-borns these days. BERTHA!