Broadcasting

Club 80s broadcasts from the Live365.com servers. The music comes from DJ Lex's personal library of 12" vinyl and rare CDs.

In order to keep the broadcast fresh, a playlist of 16 hours (390 MB/170 songs) is uploaded via FTP every other day. Assuming a listener tunes in at the same time each day, they won't hear the same song repeated for about 30 days (with the exception of requests). Keep in mind most commercial FM stations only rotate 170 songs per week.

When you hear the 30 second 'Club 80s Promo' for the broadcast, it usually represents the start of the playlist.

As of October 2004, the Club 80s library consists of 6500+ hand picked tracks. This equals over 576 hours of music.


Mixshows

Mixshow is the industry term for a non-stop music program. This is the style that professional nightclub DJs use. The tempos of songs are matched and seamlessly blended together. This is also referred to as beat matching, beat mixing, or "spinning".

DJ Lex, Einstein101, Mike W., and DJ Caz10 produce mixshows for Club 80s.

Click here for the current schedule of shows.

Equipment

The above photo is a 180 degree panorama of the studio. There are four Apple Macs that do the majority of the work, and a PC that does minimal tasks.

The DJ gear for mixing includes:

• Pioneer CDJ1000 CD Player
• Denon 2000 Dual CD Player
• Denon DN-S1000 CD/MP3 Player
• Technic 1200 Turntable
• Behringer VMX1000
• Alesis AirFX


Recording Vinyl

Listeners often ask about recording vinyl. It's no different than the old days of recording to your tape recorder; except the tape recorder is replaced by a high quality recording device.

In our case, the recording device is a G3 Powerbook with a high quality Digigram sound card. The audio is recorded in a stereo editing program called Peak.

After it's recorded, the pops and clicks that are common in vinyl are manually removed using the software tools. The audio is recorded uncompressed as AIFF files and backed up to CDRs. Then the AIFF files are converted to MP3 format for broadcasting.