Purple Rain
It’s been a while since I’ve write anything about Purple Radio so time for a quick update. Firstly, the lovely image above was the sight that greeted me the first time arrived back at the station in over two months. Leaving the place tidy and (more importantly) streaming music, I came back to find that after electrical testing, our lovely studio had been disassembled by the engineer. According to a friend on the IT & Systems team, PAT testing simply requires each device to be plugged into a machine that goes green or red, depending on whether it is safe to use. Therefore, why a full dismantle of all our expensive audio equipment was needed baffles the mind. Hopefully, a simple testing will be done next summer and save the hassle of rewiring all the equipment; although we managed to tidy the cabling and dispose of some old extension blocks - clouds with silver linings as they say.
Some of our equipment has failed and we’ll have to consider our next move. Our telephone hybrid system (of which a rather confusing manual lies on my desktop for some reason) has failed, and needs to be disassembled - whether we can do this ourselves depends on how brave our technicians feel - to be repaired. An audio limiter we also had for the turntables has the same issue, although this is not as major as the hybrid. The hi-fi we use for playing the stream in the office needed a new plug and several old extension blocks have gone into The Fail Box. Besides this, the studio has been reassembled and is happily playing an odd selection of music until broadcasting begins again in October.
Our head of the IT & Systems team has been busy with some PHP and AJAX magic to work our new Purple Player. This term came about when (as webmaster), I implemented a Flash music player on the site to listen to the stream without a client. He has taken this one step further, with a seperate window that is backed by an SQL database for the current and upcoming show details, the current song, contact form, webcams and placeholder for sponsors. We are still testing to make sure everything is working on all browsers but I am sure this is going to very popular and make it much easier to listen to the station for all students.
Finally, our website has had a slight face-lift, with some new content (finally!), rearranging some of the older stuff and expanding the information reguarding the station. I am hoping to encourage more contributions from the music and news teams to the website, to get more original content than just being the home of the station online. When we’ve got the office and studio fully back together, I will be photographing once more, as the photos from January 2008 are hopelessly out of date. Since then, we’ve had a redecorate, some new furniture and a clear out of most of our old equipment, making it less like a nuclear bunker and more a place of music and entertainment. I am one third into my term and would like to try and keep a journal here of the exploits of the station over the next two terms. The idea being that in years to come, all the things that seem irritating now will look like blissful fun in the future!