Johnny here with the first update!
This week has been a bit slow… mainly because it’s the school holidays and easter is tomorrow, so things should speed up after Wednesday.
Over the past few weeks there’s been a lot of planning in regards to why we’re here and what we’ll be doing. Things like logos and planning this site are my specialism, along with the station’s on air policies, sound and management.
I’ve gone through a bunch of designs – the main one looking like a polo and a bit of a throwback to Piccadilly Radio, It wasn’t what I originally had in my head, so i made another one which I really like, but it’s not very… well… minty.
The reason I picked “Mint” was because of it’s connotations. “Mint” is a Manchester phrase meaning “great” or “good” as is something that’s “mint condition”. Plus you’d associate mint with being fresh. I also thought about calling it “Mint Sound” becaus”sound” also has similar meanings, but I thought that was a bit much.
I’ve had some feedback from my partner in regards to branding and “Mint” wasn’t the most positive originally for us both but it was for sure a grower. Initially I thought it was a bit silly and whether it would be appropriate in a news bulletin… and I thought about other station names like “Heart” or “Galaxy” or “The Cat” or “The bee” and I think it’s fine.
I think I’m going to tweak the logo one last time though. I was considering whether green and blue was a bit dark and whether it’s too much of a not to Polo. I like having a drop shadow that is different colours, but I also like the circle mint and the font in the newer one, so we’ll see how that goes.
So what else? well there is some demo imaging. I was actually set to start a new show on another station before starting this project (But a lot of the planning and ideas have been around for quite some time before I joined that station) and because they were in the same style as I’d like to see on the station I just took the others and re-voiced them. I’m not planning on making any more right now because I’m currently planning on the first weekend test broadcast. I’ll go on a little more about that later, but I’ve been setting up the playout system. I’m not sure if i’ll be going live at any point, but I want to be able to schedule the hours and have voice tracking. I’ll also be looking to see if it’s possible to get some of my radio friends to do some voice tracked shows.
I’m using a software called radio DJ. Eventually I’d like us to use something like Myriad, but at this stage we have to work with what we have. Apparently there’s a playlist generator I can use but it only works on Windows under Windows 7, so figuring out if i can use a virtual computer running XP to do that and move the m3u playlists into the system. I want to have a very small set up which will playout the station, and then I will be able to control it and produce that from my regular production PC. I’m currently trying to establish whether I can link the databases on both computers before I do anything else.
I already have a music database. When I was working at Cineworld I made a station to play across the cinema, so I’ll use that database as a starting position and work on it from there.
As mentioned, I’m planning towards a weekend broadcast. This will only be online and will mainly be an example of the kind of music we’ll be playing. I plan on producing some news bulletins over that weekend and maybe a few shows, but essentially it’s a test broadcast. I’ll be using it for feedback purposes and it may be the first of many before a full time service. I’m not sure when that will be, but I will mention it in the next update.
Funding – so it’s really just started so not much progress has been made, but with the school holidays I’ve not been able to go much further with it, however we now have funding pages. I’m deciding whether I wasn’t to go forward with patreon and other crowd funding, but I’ll see what is going on when i get around to it.
News – I’ve been having a think about this. Eventually i’d like to sign up to something like IRN because you can either use their bulletins or use their resources to read your own news. Radio News Hub seems to be the easy solution at the moment, but you need to air their ad. I might decide to just ditch a national news bulletin, use the website to link to national stories with the biggest ones taking the lead and local stories after. I am also considering as to whether the news should be on the hour. I remember Galaxy I think at one point having the news at half past the hour, which apparently didnt work. I’m not considering that, but why doesn’t the news finish dead on the hour? If you start the news at 3 mins to the hour, the news reader can say “That’s the latest, it’s 3 oclock” and the station imaging can start the hour.
You might also be getting the vibe that I’m trying to reinvent the wheel or something, but really I’m just trying to carry on where local radio left off before it got consumed by GWR, Capital and Emap (as the groups used to be known as).
We’re also looking for content contributors and people interested in joining me with station management.. more details in the next update, but you can see this for more info. To see our funding page check this out.
That’s about it for now. I will update when there is any further developments.