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WMFO Tufts radio renovations

That's really awesome for a college station to get such an upgrade. I'm sure it will be a great asset to the DJs. I know how annoying it is to search for physical CDs when there are about 10000 CDs to search through. At my college station, we spent $27,000 over 2 years ago for Google automation. As of today, the only thing that has appeared in the studio is a $1000 touchscreen monitor that is collecting dust because no one is using it (and no one is allowed to touch it at all). The automation system was supposed to be installed within 4 months of purchase. Now, Google is out of the radio automation business, with our $27,000 (they promised to finish installation and train us how to use it in April, but we'll see).
 
That's all fine and dandy dropping a bunch of money on state of the art technology, now can someone train the people at MFO to turn off the effn transmitter when there is nobody or nothing pushing audio down the air chain.

My biggest gripe with MFO is hours upon hours of dead air.

I know when WUML Lowell doesn't have a warm body in the studio two minutes after the the transmitter detects dead air it switches over to the Talking Information Center feed that is also fed on the SCA IIRC

Too bad WMFO couldn't be as pro active
 
The rather strong implication is that in addition to the Axia mix board system, they are buying a computer-based automation system to rip all the music into. Presumably they'll also be using that system to play music out of whenever there's no live DJ in the booth.

Although having installed an Axia at WZLY a few years ago, I don't think that total dollar amount is going to cover much of an automation system. Axia is a great system, and you get lots of nice features, but it's not cheap.

Don't get me started on Google Automation...I knew that the motto of "don't be evil" would go out the window once their stock went public...and their purchase, and now abandonment, of Scott Studios' SS32 system is a prime example. Nick, don't get your hopes up...I'd be amazed if there's a single warm body left in that department today. See if you can find a nearby station that uses it and pay their engineer to come finish the job.
 
The automation will keep the station on the air so they won't have to worry about "dead" air. This is a great upgrade for the station and I'm psyched for them.
 
At my college station, the "automation" was (and still is, until Google ever comes) a 300 disc CD player. DJs recorded 80 minute automation shows and burned them on a CD. At the end of the last live show of the day, the DJ would enable the automation. It sometimes would come on in the middle of a prerecorded talk segment, and almost always in the middle of a song. And sometimes a whole automation CD skipped. Some of the automation shows were over 8 years old.
 
The plan is to broadcast 24/7.
Click to expand...

Heh. I volunteered as Operations Director there back in late 2000-early 2001 and I remember suggesting something similar and catching a lot of flak for the idea from many people (students and community volunteers) for even suggesting that WMFO "sell out to the man" and play music off a computer "like all those commercial stations do". Later I suggested they set up a rebroadcasting deal with WBRS, which at the time was on the air a lot more than WMFO was (and, many years previous, there was a rebroadcasting deal between the two stations...according to some documents I found buried in the file cabinets) and I even managed to set up a radio tuned to 100.1 to see if it would work (it sort-of did) but nothing formal ever came of it.

Anyways, it's interesting how in the past two or three years, the attitudes about using computer automation to fill the time at college stations have shifted radically as a new generation of students have come in. Previously they all just assumed that all computer automation was a bad thing because, at the time, only commercial stations had done it, and commercial radio was "evil". Now they've all grown up on iTunes and think it's weird if there ISN'T an automation system of some kind.

Speaking of which, has the station decided on a method for getting all the music into the computer system? We've been using MoonDogDigital's RoboStation at WEOS/WHWS for the past two months and it took a lot of tweaking to get it to play nice with our Enco system, but it's working great now. Not exactly cheap (but nor would I call it "expensive") but well worth it.

Ah well, it's all good. This is a great upgrade for WMFO, btw...the old Arrakis boards had terrible RF crossover/"bleed-in" problems, and the 30+ year old wiring had been "cut-splice-repeat" about 50 times over, long before I got there.
 
Good for them! My gripe with so much college radio is that it is NOTHING like what those kids will ever experience in Commercial radio - either in programming or in technology. Not that what one experiences in Commercial Radio is all that great nowadays, but this is a step in the right direction for them. I've no patience for people who don't adapt to new technologies because they think they're being hip and retro. I can imagine more than a few Program Directors and Operations people in the area that will be happy to have interns or part-timers walk in the door and at least have a sense of what a modern radio station looks like.

That Axia system is great. I just installed one down here in Atlanta, and other than having to re-learn what an air-chain is (IP Audio is hardly as straightforward as a copper wire) the install was a piece of cake. With enough tweaking, you could almost rig that thing up to function without an "automation system" and just pull audio of WinAmp or something (not that I would recomend it).
 
That Axia system is great. I just installed one down here in Atlanta, and other than having to re-learn what an air-chain is (IP Audio is hardly as straightforward as a copper wire) the install was a piece of cake.
Click to expand...

I found the Axia to be much, much easier in many ways, but you're right that it requires re-thinking of the entire way a radio station "works". In that same vein, there's several "little things" that I found to be sort-of "nickel and diming", like how there's no cue speaker...you have to burn an output on a node to wire to a speaker system to provide cue. There's no headphones jack of any kind, either...even though I would almost always wire up an external headphones system, I like to have one jack on the board itself just for the operator, and just in case your external headphones setup goes wonky. Nor are there any meters, it's all on the (not included) computer monitor.

In my case, there were also several little bugs in the software that I discovered and beat my head against repeatedly. One big issue was that it was a contract job so I could only work on the weekends, and at the time Axia support was only there during the week. So I'd hit a wall, email support, get an answer pretty fast on Monday, but have to wait a week to try it and see if it worked. Since then Axia has gone 24/7 for support.

Bitching aside, though...wiring the Axia via CAT-5 ethernet cables and Radio Systems StudioHub adapters does make life a LOT easier. And the flexible nature of IP Audio makes later configuration a snap.
 
WMFO is back on the air and sounding great. I'm not sure what they are using to get all the music in the system. I'll pass on the info posted. I do know that it is going to take some time to get it all in. Must say the students working on the system did a great job giving up their spring break and working many hours each day to get back on the air.
 
Yeah... I guess I would agree with the fact that it is missing some stuff that one would normally go "of course my console has a thingamabob in it." I think the issue is largely that the "console" in an Axia system isn't actually a console in the typical sense. It's really not much more than a giant keyboard for the Linux box that actually runs all the audio.

I've heard of a station that caught fire and the Axia console melted but the station remained on air for hours because the actual Engine running the audio was in a different room.

Most of the bugs I ran into was a dreadful lack of communication between the crew at Axia and the crew at RCS/NexGen. Took me a week of troubleshooting the GPIO system before I realized that they sent me the wrong software version in the first place!
 
I had a great time last summer there, but man what a dump! It really felt like my old college station from (almost) two decades ago. Great to see the upgrade.
 
Hey All,

My name is Drew and I'm the current GM at MFO. Thanks for the positive response to the new system. We put a lot of work into applying for the funding and of course, into installing it, which we did entirely on our own over the course of the last week. Everything is up and running (for the most part) with a few minor glitches that we're still working out. You may notice that our webstream is acting funny and our archives aren't up properly. That should all be resolved within the next 24-48 hours. We're also going through the tedious process of retraining all of our DJs, most of which have never dreamed of a system of this magnitude and complexity.

To let you know, we're using Rivendell library management and automation software (open source on Linux www.rivendellaudio.org). So far it's been really fantastic, easy to use, and very dependable.

If you have any questions about what we've done, please don't hesitate to get in touch!

Rock on.

Drew Frankel
[email protected]
 
I'll have to tune in to hear.. hard getting the over the air signal if more than a few miles from Tufts. Good luck with the bold new system !
 
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