Flavian – Page 4 – Flavian/Jazz

Radio Station Field Trip

Posted on February 21, 2009 by Flavian

Jennifer Waits (who, according to her profile, has been doing the college radio thing almost exactly as long as I have) has a blog, Spinning Indie, which covers college radio and independent music. She has an ongoing series of posts detailing her visits to college radio stations. I’m a little late to the party, but a few months ago she apparently visited WNUR, so those of you who want more views of the station and more details about the whole enterprise and where it fits in the pantheon of college radio can take a look.

I get a brief mention, and there’s a reference to my musings on the station’s old and new homes that I wrote a couple of years ago when we moved into our current studio.

Phoneathon 2009

Posted on February 20, 2009 by Flavian

WNUR’s annual Phoneathon fundraiser runs February 19-26 this year. Your support helps the all volunteer staff of WNUR bring you the kind of music you won’t hear elswhere. Pledge online or by calling (847) 491-WNUR. There are plenty of fine premiums as thank you gifts for your support.

You know what, you know why; just do it!

Update, 2/27 — Thank you! Many of you called over the last week and donated; your support is greatly appreciated. You can now sit back and enjoy the next fifty-one weeks of WNUR programming knowing that you have done your part to keep us on the air.

WNUR Playlists

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Flavian

For the first ten or so years of my tenure at WNUR DJs recorded the playlists for their shows in ratty spiral bound notebooks or three ring binders. When the notebooks were full, or at other random times, the old playlist would disappear and a new book would take its place. I’m not sure what happened to the old books; they may be filed away carefully in an archive somewhere, but knowing the station, this seems unlikely. More probably they are taking up space in some landfill or other. Eventually the station installed a computer in the control room and we started entering playlist information into a either a word processing document or a spreadsheet. There wasn’t any great consistency, and every now and then a computer crash would take all the playlists with it.

Around 2002 things got a little better organized. The PC was added to the network and the playlists were saved more securely and they started standardizing the format. At about the same time I decided to put my playlists on-line here on my website in a nice easy to find and view format during my show. There was talk of putting them on the station’s website too, but I decided not to wait for that. Eventually some of the playlists made it on- line at wnur.org either as rtf documents or simple html, but it was a manual process. It was all very messy and not very listener or DJ friendly, and was no reason for me to change how I was keeping my own playlists. There was talk of providing a nice web-based entry system; easier for the DJs and real-time information for the public, but nobody got as far as implementing it.

Fast forward to today — finally there is an on-line real-time playlist system at WNUR! Not all DJs have got with the program yet, but for those that have, playlist information is showing up on the station’s home page as the updates occur (with luck the time might actually match reality too!). There is also a way to pull up old shows by DJ, show, and date. I have started using the new system, so my playlists are showing up correctly on the WNUR home page, updated as I play each track — much easier for anybody who has a question about what’s on air.

What about this site? The short answer is that it’s not going anywhere. One of the things that my playlist system has done for me for the last seven years is to give me the ability to search over all my old playlists. I really like this as it helps stop me from getting into ruts, playing the same few tunes over and over, and it reminds me of artists whom I might otherwise neglect — too useful a featue to lose. So I have written a little script that copies the data from the new system onto my private site, so the two systems will continue in parallel for the foreseeable future. If you are used to coming here for the playlists there’s no need to change your habits; for everybody else the station’s website is an easy access point for my, and everybody else’s, playlists.

Farewell Tony

Posted on August 15, 2008 by Flavian

Dezso ‘Tony’ Tolnai WNUR is all student run and all the on air staff are volunteers — students, alums (like me), and other hangers on from the local community. The only exception to this are the technical staff: the chief engineer and the technicians who maintain the transmitter and equipment work for Northwestern. Not surprisingly the FCC requires people who know what they are doing, and who have the licenses to prove it, handle the details of keeping the transmitter safe and legal. Since I started at the station Tony Tolnai has been the chief engineer (and much else besides); he actually started in 1985, the year before I came to WNUR, but as far as I’m concerned he has always been there as a benign guiding force. He has been in charge of keeping our old equipment functioning, and the planning of two new studios and the moves into them (see here for a little the story of the moves). Here’s a brief, if somewhat out of date, profile of Dezso ‘Tony’ Tolnai, Director of Media Technology for Northwestern’s School of Communication (or School of Speech as it was always known), and WNUR’s long time chief engineer from the October 2002 edition of the [Northwestern Observer Online](http://www.northwestern.edu/univ- relations/observer/stories/10_31_02/tolnai.html).

Tony is retiring after serving us long and well; we’ll miss him.