Nearly ready & all tested…

Well – by “all tested”, I mean we’ve been through every bit of wire and checked it for phase and level and made sure we’ve plugged all the right bits of stuff into the right holes.  I’ll summon up the energy to bring you new photos of the “rack” tomorrow… meantime, I hate to burden you with anticipation but I can say I’m happily listening to a test stream of our online ouput right now in glorious 64k aacPlus encoding (and not so glorious 64k WMA encoding) – I’d really love to give you the URLs right now but chances are we’ll have missed something vital and it’ll drop off overnight and there’ll be egg on face all round.

So, hoping to get this pre-launch ‘test’ URL out to you in the next day or so; once we’ve done all our final checks and put in our backup links and redundant equipment.  You’ll understand, I’m sure.

People keeping asking about the Sky thing – again, once we’ve got absolutely all our ducks in order, we’ll crank that up too.  It won’t be this week but it will be before the official launch… watch this space.  There’s also a small chance we may start earlier than 6th October on the DAB muxes – but no promises, mind.  Things are cooking back here.

Someone asked on another post whether it would all be voicetracked and I wondered if that really mattered.  Sitting here listening to this audio – effectively a non-stop bunch of bits of music in a row – you kind of think “what’s special about that”?  I can do that on my iPod.  But for me, the magic of radio and in particular the stations which have behind them hugely professional programmers – is that feeling of divesting your listening pleasure to the “idea” – call it what you will – the brand, the club.  Being part of a bunch of people in the same community, listening to the same thing at the same time and hearing the presenter enthuse about that music.  There’s no presenter on the music I’m listening to right now but Mike put it all together – you can feel his passion for the music in the selections.  You get a feeling that someone apart from you absolutely cared about putting that stuff together.

And I can say for certain, we all do.  Putting this stuff together has given us an interesting tangent from the day job of looking after local radio services across the UK.  We care a lot about that as well – sometimes you listen to a bit of great local radio and get the same feeling – but we’ve all been really excited by this great new thing.  And I think that excitement will come through in the programmes you hear whether live or voicetracked.

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Published:
September 23, 2008 / 10:31 pm
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Jazz FM technology
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