The Computer and the D J

Every time I play a Hank Williams tune on Ninety Eight One the Bull I wonder what he would think if he knew his music had been digitized and stored somewhere in a data base, retrieved and broadcast over the air waves. In fact, I wonder many times what I'M doing in this ultra modern, state of the art broadcast studio, full of computers, phone banks, circuit boards, fax machines and the like! Being "middle-aged," I come from a bygone disc jockey era of records, turntables, dial telephones and reel to reel tape recorders.

I must admit though, computers and technology have made the job of on air personality much easier. I won't go so far as to say they pay me too much, but sometimes I think I'm having more fun than I should, being at work and all...

Before each show I do on Sunday morning, a computer is instructed to create a "music log", a list of the songs that will be loaded into the main "station computer" which is actually broadcasting on the air. This job used to be done by hand, with a notebook containing all available songs and artists, taking care to schedule each artists song in a rotation with the ultimate goal of greater variety. When playing new songs as well as old, the log must consider the frequency of the plays for the newer ones, the not so new, and the old. This was quite time consuming in the "old days", but the music computer does it in minutes, freeing up the program director for other tasks.

The computer program we use for broadcast is called Prophet. I still marvel at the capabilities of this system. After it is programmed with the music, commercials, and jingles, it has the amazing ability to find each thing and play it when it's told. That's a little un-nerving for a disc jockey! After all, we're only human, and thank goodness for a personality. All of this is done in preparation for, you guessed it, showtime! It's up to me now to come in, re-arrange everything to fit in requests, and tell it to stop so I can talk! While doing my show, I can look into the Prophet's memory to see if there are songs my listeners have requested, put them in my playlist, mouse click and drag songs down to different locations, and even delete songs we don't really want to play.

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