It’s been a wild start to the New Year for us folks here at WRFA-LP! On New Year’s Day we experienced what would be the radio equivalent of a full-scale nuclear meltdown at our studio in Jamestown. Basically, the hard drive that ran our automation system and also held more 11,000+ audio files suffered a mechanical malfunction and met an untimely demise. All the audio on that hard drive was lost (we never did get around to backing up all those files!) and we were left scrambling trying to keep the station on the air while also searching for any and all audio we could use from our other computers to try and get things back to normal as quickly as possible. It’s taken us a little over a week, but I think it’s safe to say things are almost back to normal…. or as normal as a community radio station can get.
We’d also like to extend a thank you to all our listeners for being patient while we worked on getting back to normal, and all our supporters who offered to help us out upon learning of our SNAFU. Volunteers, members of our board of directors, and even business representatives all said they’d be willing to do what they could to help us get the station back up and running and we greatly appreciate all the offerings that have come forward.
With that being said, there are a couple of things we may need some help with in the coming days/weeks:
1. Record Liners and Station IDs – We’d like to invite our listeners to help us expand our station liner and ID audio library by stopping by our studio and recording one or more liners. They can be funny, creative, or simple, like “You are listening to WRFA LP – 107.9 FM in Jamestown, NY. Radio for the Arts.” We especially encourage musicians, artists and community leaders to participate.
2. Music Library Volunteer – As noted above, we lost over 11,000 audio files on our hard drive, many of which were songs and albums we had in our music rotation. While we do have many of those albums on CD, it still takes time to transfer those songs from CD to our electronic music library, and also to properly label each and every file for quarterly reporting purposes. If you have a few hours each week available and would like to help us expedite this task, it would be greatly appreciated.
To learn more about helping us with either project, email wrfanews@gmail.com or give us a call at (716) 664-2465 ext 222.
Once again, thank you very much for your patience and understanding while we’ve worked and continue to work on getting WRFA-LP back to normal. We can assure you we will do our best to prevent this from happening in the future (in other words, we will be backing up all our files and hard drives on a regular basis).
Here’s to a very happy and (Hopefully) smooth rest of 2012 for WRFA-LP. Low Power to the People, Right On!
– Dennis, Steve & Jason
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