News, Technology-Related

Hi to everyone who reads my blog!

This is going to be a technology-related post as quite a lot has happened recently in that regard. I'll follow it up with a more personal blog post as soon as I can.

I've been doing quite a lot of work on the website and intend to do some more soon. I added the ability to vary the font size of the text being displayed together with changing the foreground and background colours. This is something I had wanted to implement for a while.

An ongoing project has been to get a desktop computer which would replace my much older desktop. For at least five years, I used a desktop computer with a very noisy fan. Particularly in hot weather, this machine used to scream the place down! Not good if you are doing audio production work or internet broadcasting.

Anyway, the machine eventually stopped working a couple of months ago and I wondered what I was going to replace it with.

I now have replaced it with a nice quiet Del computer. I had to search around a while to find a machine with Windows XP installed, but I now have one, and it is far far better than the old desktop ever was.

To say again, the best thing about the machine is that it is quiet with very little fan noise. But it is very fast, especially for audio editing!

The one bad thing about getting a different computer is that you have to spend time getting all your applications installed and configured the way you want them. But it is now done, and it really is a great machine.

Because of the large capacity of the hard drive (although I do have an external USB drive as a backup), I am now able to share out the music library here on the network. This means that, when I am at L's, we both have access to all the music for broadcasting which is really cool.

One of the things I have been investigating is to give people the ability to search our music library for a track they would like to hear when we are broadcasting, and then send a request to Lulu or myself when we are on air. I do now have a very very good solution for this which I would like to implement soon, however at the moment there are a few changes I want to make to our library before that can be done. So it definitely will happen as soon as I can invest the time to do what I need to do.

The last thing I have been working on is using StationPlaylist Creator. This is software which allows you to effectively structure shows (or anything you are broadcasting). It is important if possible to divide your music into categories, tell it where your promos and jingles are, together with any sequences you might use. That is putting it in its simplest terms.

This has taken some configuration but it is now all in place. There are some shows we produce for the Global Voice where Creator would be absolutely ideal. If the forward planning and organisation is done well, Creator can be a really excellent tool and I can see how useful it is going to be.

That's all for my technology news at the moment. I am looking forward to broadcasting on the Global Voice over the weekend!

Catch you all later!