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WHRW In Between

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Shortly before a management change at WHRW-FM caused the station to veer from its free-form and community-based roots, a few of us undertook a project to bring dead-air automation to the station. The station had understandably been anti-automation since such a thing was possible, but during holidays and school breaks, the station was spending an increasing amount of time off the air because there was simply no one interested in broadcasting. The station itself was already facing the sort of growing apathy generated by the ease of access to music elsewhere, like the Internet, but to those of us who spent a lot of time there, it was still a special place. To keep it on the air was to keep it alive.

We thought the right balance between its freeform spirit and a need to be on the air 24/7 was to create special, thematic content for the "in-between" times and rotate it in an intelligent fashion. I ended up learning Perl so I could write a basic automator that would run quietly on a Linux machine tucked away in the GM's office; however, it had to automatically obey FCC and station regulations for IDs, breaks, and so on. About 300 lines of Perl later, we had a script that ran constantly, inserting breaks and IDs where appropriate, and rotating custom-produced content the rest of the time. We ran a dedicated line to the control room so that the last live DJ on the air could just fade it in and leave, and the next live DJ could fade it out and start live programming. We branded it "WHRW In Between."

The system continues to be used this day, which is odd, because I could have sworn I sent them a letter asking to have my spots removed when I left (as I don't believe in their new direction and I really don't want to support it). Guess I should take it as a compliment.

Nonetheless, our flagship feature was "Members' Picks" - members selected their favorite tracks and recorded a detailed intro and outro explaining their fondness for each track. These would then be added to a pool of content from which the automator could select. These are some of the Members' Picks spots I produced for the system.

Despite being on the air and invovled in many ways for the better part of ten years, this seemed to get the most attention from listeners. For a while I had a lot of people tell me, "Yeah, I was scanning through the stations in my car the other night, and there you were, talking about your favorite music. It was really interesting."

The majority of the actual songs have been cut out of these versions to keep the lawyers away, but when these were aired, the entire song was played. The gentleman doing the bumpers at the top and bottom of each spot is an old WHRW cohort, Charles "Chris Played by Charles Berman" Berman, who was a fellow Mad Trivia alum and a stringent supporter of the In Between project.