Week 1 Postmortem

• Our first show - Katie Traxton's Sunday Lunch - was pretty successful. It went out on time, and the constant flow of guests in and out of the studio was handled with ease. There were some computer issues at first - mostly down to the presenters not being given enough training beforehand - and the great vocals were unfortunately affected by some sound quality issues (now fixed).
• Listener figures have been lower than we might have hoped, but in retrospect, it's been a very soft launch; aside from the ads in the OxStu and some Facebook activity, there's been very little press. It's not entirely a bad thing; better perhaps that the press start to take notice after we've ironed out all the problems and are consistently delivering a quality broadcast.
• Shows in general are sounding great. Presenters sound much more in control of their shows; there's been no 'hmm what shall we have next' or fumbling while the next track is being queued up. A few shows are even starting to use things like live sound effects and custom jingles, which is awesome. We have a little work to do with regards to beds - both technical and legal/licensing work - but once that's done we can train up presenters and get everyone sounding awesome.
• Some listeners have reported problems using the website to listen in, which I'm investigating. It's also been suggested that some colleges might be blocking internet radio; if anyone knows this to be the case for their college, please do get in touch and we can start lobbying that college's IT department to let us through.
• There have been a number of automation issues - shows not being automatically started when they're supposed to be started, shows being cut off, dead air, and so on. I'm happy to report that we've got most of these solved now. The way that the automation is supposed to work is now well understood; over the past couple of days, most automation problems have been down to miscommunications about the schedule, rather than technical problems.
• We were very quick to break the story about the Gaza protest. The protest started around noon; we covered it in the newscast at 2pm, and covered it again at 4pm, complete with recordings of the protest and vox pops. Cherwell Online didn't publish their coverage until 9:43pm, and the OxStu went to print the night before so they won't have coverage until next week. We seem to have even beaten the BBC, though it's hard to determine exactly when they first mentioned it. Alas, the Oxford Mail had coverage up at 1:21pm... but still, it's not bad for our first week. The audio footage of the protest was a bit of a special arrangement, but it's a nice demonstration of what the station is capable of.
• We have over 1000 songs in the database! Granted there are some duplicates amongst them, but that's not bad going for a single week. Don't forget, you're welcome to use any of the songs in our database for your shows. Importing music has been a bit confusing and error-prone, but we've found a solid working process now, so I'll be making it more accessible.
• There's been a little bit of trouble with voice recording levels, sometimes because people aren't speaking directly into the presenter mic and sometimes because the sliders just aren't set right for the voices of the people in the room. We're looking into getting a hardware compressor for the studio; in the meantime, don't forget to listen on the headphones, and if you've got time to do a quick sound test in Audacity before you start recording then go for it. If you're prerecording your show then you can also use Audacity's compressor filter to balance out your levels; I've written a paragraph on how to do this in the producer's pack already.
• Some shows have been seeing an issue whereby imported music doesn't play back properly - it goes into logs but just gets skipped over at playback. I'm working with the developers of the software on this one; we know what's happening, we're just not yet sure why. If you spot that a song is broken, you can fix it by opening up its cart, hitting 'Edit Markers' and tapping both the 'Trim Start' and 'Trim End' buttons. At the moment this affects roughly 100 entries in the library; I'll be fixing them up ASAP. The importer also isn't properly handling tracks with non-English characters in their names, another issue I'm looking into.
• The studio needs a bit of tidying and a bit of decoration. The loose network cable in the live computer needs replacing, and we need to get a bin for the studio. Also, posters, and not just instructional ones...

I think those are my main observations from the past week. My top priorities this week are fixing up the importer and the website.

How about you guys? How do you think the first week's been?

Thanks for making it a fun first week, everyone.

- Richard