This station has a number of names: The ERICADE Radio Network, TERN, ericade.radio and ericade radio. It’s mine and I play 24/7 chiptune and demo scene music on it. It’s located on ericade.radio or radio.ericade.net. Either way works…

… Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the daily chaos

It was quite a chilling realization when it hit me. I couldn’t believe my bad luck, when a calm 30 minutes before the in-official launch, became a frantic race to get the show on the radio at all. I was new to the voice tracking way of doing radio, where you record the bits between the songs at a rapid pace. You hear the last four seconds of a tune, speak, and then advance to the next one. No need to wait for the song to end, and thus you can push the next hour of programming “in front in you”, while on the air.

That’s all good and fine, but I had recorded 30 minutes worth of funny banter, an introduction speech, and some thoughts – and placed it all on the wrong broadcasting hour. It would NOT be heard at midnight when the station was to officially open to the world. In fact, the station was about to go live, and I had just voice tracked the hour before the launch to give me some time to get it right at midnight. I would soon hear myself announcing the grand opening in an hour, knowing it just didn’t exist. I had totally screwed everything up.

If you wonder, yes that is normal radio for you. Always been that way. two hours later I might have sounded a little bit stressed out as I announced the new station. Those remaining minutes, I ran on adrenalin and total panic. As the hour completed, I looked at the statistics: no-one had listened – not even a second.

Trying to look cool. Great it’s radio, so the listeners did not have to see this.

The ERICADE Radio Network is a grand tradition. I was a community broadcaster between 1995 and 2006 and had a dream of playing Amiga tracked music on the radio. I held three tracked music competitions on my bulletin board system called “The ERICADE Network” and most of the entries were then played on the air. In 2005 I took all the tracked tunes I had on my board and created a playlist using Win Amp and Shout cast send out a signal over an uncaring Internet. It was on there until 2015, when I removed it for good. Yeah, I told you this story before.

That was supposed to be it. But in 2020 something nasty came along and I ended up stranded at home alone for a long time. I listened to the reports and worried. The first time during the pandemic I travelled as an IT-security consultant to an adjacent city. But after the summer, spent almost no time outside my apartment. At first, I felt productive, but as months passed, I got less and less happy and started working at odd hours or starting late. I needed some good hobby, so it wasn’t work and then idly surfing on Facebook. It was hardly a decision I made. It was something that grew out of boredom and the will to create something cool. And I wanted that Amiga radio station I always dreamt about. But, no, that not the entire story.

I had no idea about this ever becoming a station as I made a few live broadcasts on Facebook playing Amiga-music and chatting with friends, family, and co-workers. The problem was that playing songs was hard. I tried VLC, but it wasn’t meant to be a sound board or a jukebox. Connecting father’s old Wurlitzer to the station would have worked better. It from 1955 and is heavier than I am by the way. Buying Ads on Google is a thing nowadays, and Jason Allen from PlayIt live seems to have put a bid, putting his software “PlayIt live” on the top of the page as I was looking for some sort of music player that could generate playlists for me.

But PlayIt live was no mere playlist-player. I noted, it was meant for broadcasters on a budget. Bad idea – you know me and radio. It just had to be done. I decided to create a station as soon as it struck me, I now had the tools to do so.

September the 14th was the first real on-air day, and I could hardly devote a workday to broadcast. They don’t pay me for that. My idea was smart for doing something so stupid as to create a station for just a handful of listeners. I simply devoted 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes on the evening as a coffee-break broadcast routine. Being home alone just meant that the coffee-breaks during workdays were a few minutes for surfing on Facebook and drinking coffee. Nothing was really lost.

The last hours were done in the evening. This routine had me going “live” for 24 hours a day. If you weren’t tired of hearing my voice before, you certainly had the possibility to be so now. I was already clear that I was just the DJ. The station needed a voice. A singing jingle-woman would have been awesome, but that was beyond my budget. So, I went to the website Fiverr and clicked on the first female voice actress on the page: Nicole Carino. Her voice felt right so quickly, I didn’t bother to look for alternatives. Voice actors generally get paid per words spoken. I ordered the first station IDs before the station even launched.

Yes, I’ve spoken about station ids. No need to repeat that. Just know that a station I identifies the station and often gives you a nice slogan. “You’re listening to The ERICADE Radio Network – Your leader in tracked music”. Oh, maybe I should tell you what the name is all about. ERICADE?

Yup. I was a dumb kid, when I decided to create my first gaming development company for the Commodore 64. It would program great games in C64 Basic and it had to have a unique name to go with it as well: Accolade. My father wasn’t buying the latter part of that, as Accolade existed. And I knew that. I also knew about copyright. But my father then took my first name “Erik” and “Accolade” and merged it to “Ericade”. I hated it! Worst name, ever!

Look! I made this program. I also mix English and Swedish and can’t spell correctly in either language.

But over time, it grew on me. Ericade. My own company. I had no idea what to call myself. In early stuff I created I call myself stuff like “System-1”, “Systeme-1” and “Steelpulse” (stolen as well) of ERICADE. But none of that felt right. When I joined with the very geeky organization “Unga Forskare” (Young Researchers), I was introduced to Unix and Linux. The background processes were called Daemons. Today, Linux calls them “Services”. But a service is often still named something ending with a “d”, like SSHd or FTPD. Yeah! The Daemons are still there.

Daemon of ERICADE! The was my one-man show, program developer, demo group, BBS network, arms dealer, and research department. I may have embellished parts of that list a bit. Anyway…

In 2020, I had long renamed myself the Stripecat on the Internetz. This was originally “Tigersclaw”, named after the spaceship in Wing Commander 1. But a tiger is a striped cat, so I changed it. But when I hit the airwaves, Daemon had to come back. It was my name as a sysop in the real (but lame) demo group “Eternal” and my handle on my BBS called the ERICADE Network. Network? It sounded good to call the BBS that as it ran “in the speed of light”.

Funny note – it was Nicole Carino who commented that it should be “AT the speed of light”. So, I have had a slogan with incorrect grammar for the last 25 years. Aha, ok. Fine.Now I had nice Station ID like: “The ERICADE Radio Network – Amiga blast from the past!”, “The ERICADE Radio Network remembers … the Commodore Amiga” and “Music from the geeks of the 80s and 90s – The ERICADE Radio Network delivers!”.

Nicole had an amazing dictation and a super clear voice. It sounded good. My intent of the station was that it would sound as the old-time radio stations. I have a history of being a radio DJ in Stockholm for a community broadcaster. During the 90s we spoke fast and as we were in a hurry and no silence was allowed. The music was always mixed, and we spoke until the artist started singing. This is still common with commercial stations to this day, but I wanted something else. Getting older, I listened to Swedish radio from the 60s and 70s. It left gaps between the songs and the announcer. It was also impossible to speak until the vocal began, as tracked music seldom had any to begin with. I wanted this slow, steady, and calm pacing. Nicole spoke in a natural and methodic way. Today, the station has a very different pacing. This is no mistake. It’s simply that I changed my mind a bit, and the station a lot.

I also had the idea of one story per hour, or as the listeners probably would have called it: “long, boring ramblings”. The first broadcast day, I noted that listeners were no better than the ones listening to normal radio. They are in it for the music, not my musings. I quickly understood that a music station cannot allow me to speak for more than 40 seconds. Later, I had to rethink even that. It’s a thing called a format. Music station play music and talk radio shouts incoherent ramblings about politics. I was a music DJ, so I had to learn.

And you cannot learn faster than when you had the listener logs updating in front of you. When that well-thought-out diatribe against that pesky computer called an “Atari” hit the air, and I saw people disconnecting. That was an immediate “Ouch, dammit”-moment right there. I am snarky to the core if I want to. That was kind of my idea when I started the station. At first, I intended to voice act as a 40 something nerd living in a bunker that is really his mother’s basement. Thankfully I understood that people would not really get it was just an act. But what possessed me to even conjure up such a dumb idea? Fallout! Yes, the Bethesda gaming series with colourful personalities such as Threedog, the “Wolfman Jack”-copy that was always commenting on your progress in the game. Or the malignant “President Eden” or the smooth talking “Mr New Vegas”. I also LOVED the fan-created stations. Especially the constantly drunk Esaias Pendergrass who progressively got more plastered as he announced the records. I love the idea of role-playing games, so I had to create my own persona. And wisely choose not to.

But I did put up a set of 20-something short musings. Please understand that the negativity about the Atari was just for fun. Amiga and Atari-owners always feuded about everything back in the day. It was just a game of sorts. So I thought it was fun to add to the station. I probably lost some listeners over it. Guess what computer brand they must have prefered.

• Do you know the difference between an Amiga and an Atari? If you own an Amiga, you do. If you own an Atari, you don’t.
• If you got nothing better to do right now, patronize a bulletin board system! There is probably some lonely sysop that could use some company right now.
• Do you remember when Amiga meant friend? Not me, but I do remember a time when the Amiga brand wasn’t fought over by all the vultures.
• Do you remember all those popup adverts, GDPR cookie messages and irrelevant warnings about having not enabled Windows Defender on the Amiga? Me neither.
• If the PC is a man in a costume, the MAC is a hipster artist… Then the Amiga is the girl who never left the party.
• World peace can only occur when Amiga and Atari-users settle their differences. As you understand now, world peace will never happen.
• Look, you probably think I give Atari users a hard time, and maybe I shouldn’t. They had to own an Atari, so they have suffered enough already.
• If you have “Carpe diem” painted on your wall, you have in fact already failed at life. Everyone knows you should have an Amiga poster instead.
• You know what? I want “Amy the squirrel” to be the new symbol for the Amiga. Hah! Try to buy the rights to that, Cloanto!

Off course she is a squirrel. I mean the Amiga community is patently nuts.

While funny, the got a bit tedious if you had listened for a few days. I ended up creating nearly hundreds of them. But I could not understand that it would fail to create a true music station. I was still kind of in love with the in-game music stations of Fallout and Grand Theft auto.

As I was putting more effort into a podcast called “IT-säkerhetspodden”, which is a Swedish podcast about IT-security. Then I started expanding my knowledge about digital audio recording and bought a lot of hardware and software. A lot of lonely evenings were spent mastering the equipment and my recordings.

The first setup ran on an old computer I had left over. PlayIt live ran with the additional audio processing and live-broadcast plugins. I also bought a lifetime license for all the core modules. Including the “Voice tracking” one. You know the thing made gullible listeners believe I never ever slept. While expensive, I felt that having no house or boat costing lots of money gave me some cosmic kind of right to buy whatever I wanted. Also, with no wife complaining about all the radio equipment… What the heck. Stuff is fun!If you want to get technical, my microphone was the legendary Shure SM7B, and I had a Rode Rodecaster as an audio processor. That is a nice setup that also helped me produce IT-security lectures for my work and for customer reports. The mike was on a boom-arm, that I could swing in front of me as soon as a new type of security problem needed an explanation. A few minutes later, the presentation or webinar was up on the corporate site.

And I also produced radio and podcasts. This was nice if a bit excessive. But I know of other people having the same setup. Jor-El from Edison has this with a Blue Yeti-microphone and Mikko Hyponnänen does the same kind of lectures (although much more popular than mine) as I do with the same sort of setup. I can mention more people, but you get the point. It’s what it means to produce stuff currently.

In December, I had a Discord forum and a Facebook page for the station. I had by that time stopped voice tracking the station as I had less time for it. But one day I made a short show at 9 PM Swedish time. I just spoke a little bit and played some music. One of our frequent guests on Discord liked it and wrote “Make it a podcast”. The rest is history as they say. I originally intended to call this new show the “Golden hours” as it was to air 9 PM which is a very nice and calm part of the evening. But I know it’s just a slip of the tongue away from a more adult theme. And that was not a good thing to say on the air.

The calm and rational stare of a man getting hit by a plasma gun between the eyes. That’s going to leave a scar. And maybe, like half of the neck.

So, I instead called it “Amiga Flashback”. Now, you might comment of Flashback being an effect of drug usage. But I referred to the old Delphine game Flashback and the fact that it sounds a bit like “blast from the past” or at least gives you that impression. The show I made later became episode one in the podcast series. It has the episode name “A prequel better than Star wars” and episode two was the first “Amiga flashback” proper. The idea was to make a proper show that would become a podcast shortly after it had aired. This idea stuck and has remained to this day.During the autumn I had produced short weekly videos chronicling the past week on the station. I recorded it in different parts of the apartment. Due to being recorded late on Sunday evening and my insomnia, I tended to sound tired and worn. That was no lie. But it was kind of funny to watch, even though it was more often on my expense rather than due to any skill.The show disappeared as soon as I started the podcast. But problems were on the horizon. I had bought a better computer for the station and ran it on Linux with Playit live running in a virtual machine on Windows 10. The machine could take the workload, but it wasn’t terribly stable. I had many fights with it. But the worst problem, was that my big stash of Amiga-tunes was running low.

Egads! What to do? What to do? I found modarchive, a site with thousands of great tracked tunes. Great! But that caused another problem I wasn’t aware of until much later. I did not know that files with the ending “.xm” could not be played with an Amiga. That was Fasttracker. Still, I put them on the station. The podcast switched from a fun project to a very structured way of consistently getting new tunes on the station.

And that meant that it became more and more of a chore. The production was nightmarish at times. I used VLC to convert the tunes. It was buggy, horrendous and had no consistent levelling. VLC is not good at handling tracked music at all. It’s deceptively well-behaved, that it takes a while to understand that it does not always sound right. Amiga-tunes had an extremely broad Stereo-field that probably induced some sort of split-personality disorder in the listeners.

I put a lot of effort into the early podcasts, telling stories. But over time I observed listener patterns, spoke to listeners about their experience and thought about it. I also listened to the radio shows I sought to sound like. No show more than Leif “Smoke rings” Andersson’s legendary jazz show called “Smoke rings”. I had no voice like his but listened to his delivery. He spoke between 20-50 seconds and that ended up becoming my first guideline for the show. This got more refined over time. But I struggled with trying to figure out what kind of show I was making and what kind of DJ I was.

Never happy with the audio, my voice or basically everything else. I still noted how it challenged me to learn, to overcome and to become better at a wide range of skills. I had to understand the listeners as well. And it took time as I’m stubborn as a whole barn of donkeys.

In December the SM7B was replaced by a Neumann TLM103 condenser mike. All the early podcast episodes were made with that mike and the Rodecaster. It sounded decent. In February we still were in lockdown with no Covid-end in sight. It’s beyond me why no one got nuts in the Kreml or White house and nuked everyone. Working from home was both a blessing and a curse. I decided to buy a new microphone. I had always admired the Beatles as a group, and they used the Neumann U47 and U67. Both those were out of my price range. But I did get a good price on a Neumann U87 with a studio kit. That’s still my work horse of a microphone.

I threw out the Rodcaster and switched to a more basic setup with a normal sound card and a Samson compressor/limiter/de-esser as I tried to get a cleaner sound. Remember me and never ever being done with improving anything ever?

In April 2021 I decided to automate the processing. I had just started doing demo scene top lists and reviews. Revision 2021 taught me how I needed to change how I worked with tracked music. VLC was not the right tool. I wrote a bash-script and installed the player XMP to create the first “audio production line” I ever had. For its flaws, it was consistently good at what it did. I started using loudness normalization with that script as well. That meant all songs played at about the same level. You have no idea how good that is until you realize you never again have to pull the volume up or down on your radio as you listen to the station.

Previously the poor audio process plugin had to work at its highest setting to get the audio levels close to right. So, it went between sounding nice to sounding like the artist was hit by a truck while recording the tune. The tracked music was all over the place with audio quality and levels.

I still had a large set of files with music created before this improvement. But still. For me, this was a huge thing. Like inventing the wheel or something. And about as primitive.

– “Ugh! Me do LUFS! Me know radio! Fire hot!””

I then switched the Unified Audio sound card. It had onboard software effects that also worked in Studio 1 and other digital audio workstations. Playit live accepted all voice recordings from the microphone and sound card “as is”. So, it had to be processed before even getting there. Either that or you would sound like “my first tape recorder” from Fisher-price. So, the UAD did a lot of the work and added tube warmth, limiting and 1000 other ways to trash your audio. Neat!

I also gave the station audio processor the boot and got my first multiband-compressor software called JBB. I got it of some strange site from someone in a trench coat speaking with a Russian dialect. Or so it felt. It had been abandoned by its author. But did it sound good? You betcha!

In May 2021 the station was finally starting to sound right (or so I thought). I had tried some software called “Thimeo Stereo tool” as a station processor. Man, what a wreck. It broke so badly, that in a tearful moment I swore on my pet goats grave never to use that again. I held that promise… For what, two months.

I also reinstalled the broadcast server from scratch and got rid of the virtual setup.

May 2021, I had voice tracked daily most of the spring, but it was quite a chore and listening wasn’t exactly stellar. But I soldiered on. The podcast was still telling stories, but I was strict on timing and used scripted speeches. I’m no good at reading anything loud, so it was a lot of work producing the episodes. I was much better at adlibbing, but still, English is not my native tongue. So, you were always guaranteed a true Swenglish performance. But I don’t sound worse than any other Swedish trying to speak in English. I know that is saying nothing. Don’t remind me.

I was then approached by a group of Amiga musicians that wanted to play their tunes on my station. This did take a bit of an unexpected turn, as they changed their mind after noting that I played so many non-Amiga tunes. Remember I didn’t really know that Fast tracker couldn’t play on an Amiga, and I failed to notice that I was putting in more and more Impulsetracker-tunes as well. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it forced me to rethink. And that is how the station became a “tracked music” broadcaster rather than an Amiga-station. The podcast was renamed from “Amiga Flashback” to “Flashback, tracks from the past”. And a lot of restrictions were lifted on what I could play. The Amiga-tunes were still the centre of it all.

Everything was getting better, and I decided to add 50-60 fresh speeches to those retro-computer themed snarky voiceovers the station did twice hourly. I choose life advice for some weird reason. It was super funny on the blog and penned by me. As spoken on the station, not so much. Or maybe it was if you wanted to laugh at me rather than at what I was saying. The performance was not bad, but lines like this sounded more than just a bit out of place on a music station:

– Learn from the experienced, then apply it to your own life in order to not do their mistakes… Or not… You know, not doing it gives you their experience. There’s always that.

– Winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win. If you don’t win and don’t quit, you need to learn the “sunken cost fallacy”.

– You’re often wrong… … especially when you just understood something…

While not a huge mistake, it made the station sound unprofessional. But in the summer, things were beginning to change.

It’s very impressive with all the blinkly lights. This important to show to your unimpressed friends so they know how cool a radio station is.

I decided to give Thimeo Stereo Tool another go. I could see the quality in it. And the problem that made it break turned out to be easy to fix once I reached out to the user community that it had. And then I was finally the happy owner of a true broadcast compressor. After tuning it and pulling out most of my hair, it finally sounded right. Who am I kidding, I felt it sounded less bad. The tool is awesome, but my belief in my own prowess as a sound engineer is not so strong. But I learned and eventually the station got that professional sound I wanted.In July I attended the Edison demo party 2021, broadcasting live on location. I was the proud owner of two Covid19 vaccine-injections and thus felt invulnerable enough to attend. It was fun and quite a learning experience. I ended up broadcasting during Friday and Saturday. But the latter recording broke due to a technical malfunction, so it could not be rebroadcast. But it sounded good as it was on the air.

During the summer I focused the podcast on many of the demo parties running and got a lot of brand-new tunes for the station.The website had already from the start showed the name of the song playing, but the artist was a problem. Tracked music does not have an artist field. So, you must guess who made it. Often, they write their handle in the comments or instrument list. However, sometimes they seem to be too ashamed to say who they are. I put a lot of effort into getting the names into the artist field of the station website. And eventually I decided this had to be fixed in a better way. I started a huge undertaking of creating a fancy technical thing called an “API”. That’s short for Automatic Pudding Imaginer. Or something like that. It’s simply a function on the website collecting what’s playing and making a searchable database for it. The station broadcast tool, PlayIt Live sent what was playing and the API had to figure out if it knew of it already of not. This made a lot of new features possible, like short information about the artists and the tunes. The website could now tell you a lot about what was playing and letting you click on links to go to their Bandcamp site or artist site on Modarchive. It may seem simple, but the effort was big, and I sank many hours into it.

In August the “all clear”-signal came here in Sweden. Covid was “no more”, and everyone could get back to work. Well, it wasn’t that easy, really. It was just that the mutations were getting less dangerous, and no one wanted to stay in lockdown forever. As I’m writing this, Covid seems to come and go as it pleases. And yes, people still die from it. But try to understand that we really wanted to believe it was gone. And it was probably the only right decision to make. I was kind of unsure of going back to the office, but I did. Covid did visit me in November 2021, and it was no fun, let me tell you that. But this meant the live broadcasts were over. The podcast continued.

A voice actor and a broadcaster providing their voices to the station.

In August I switched from Nicole Carino to Jono Woodward as station voice when I commissioned him to create new Station IDs. As I tested those, I noted that Jono’s fast paced Station ID made the station feel much more like a true music station. But I couldn’t really match him, as I talk more slowly. This also made me realize that the live DJ-performances were over. I did the last one on the exact one-year anniversary of the station’s birth. And that also meant that the switch to the new Station IDs were final. If you ever hear Nicole’s voice on this station in the future, it means the broadcast system has gone to greener pastures. Her voice is the “we’re off the air message” you would rather not want to hear.

During the autumn I experimented in returning to storytelling as the demo parties dried up a bit. Some good stories came out of that, but the podcast was hard to define. Was it about demo parties, retro-stories or just the music? Well, yes. And it turned out I would have to make a choice later.

In the fall of 2021, the stars came rolling in. I had finally succumbed to that “give it stars”-craze. You know how everything needs a rating. But it did give me insights as people started rating the songs. I learned the novelty “funny tunes” were universally hated and everyone loves Dr. Awesome. Come on – his name is “Dr. Awesome”, and that’s truth in advertising. But he also got lots of airtime on the station, so it was probably also a big reason. Still, he was really supergood at what he was, and still is, doing. All Amiga tunes were removed from the station and had to apply for their jobs again. Not because I’m a bad boss, but because I wanted them to sound good. All the VLC-converted garbage was thrown out. I knew that if I converted them correctly this time, I would never have to do that again. And as you understand by now, that was totally wrong as per usual. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

Winter was putting snow all over Sweden, or it would have if there were any snow. It was a pretty “Novemberish” winter as far as I recall. To celebrate something or at least fix a problem, I decided that all Amiga-tunes had to played in mono. And I recorded a special episode of the show were I only played Amiga-tunes never heard on the station for two hours. That episode was called “Four channels to the wind”, a take on the old saying “four sheets to the wind”, which means being drunk as a skunk. I sure wanted to be, but broadcasting drunk is a bad idea. It gives the sound a somewhat boxed in and mushy mid-range. Mostly because you end up throwing up all over the mixing console. And we can’t have that. So, I stayed sober.

In January I asked a friend to listen to an episode of Flashback, tracks from the past. I wanted him to give me ideas on how to improve listening. He was blunt about his feelings towards it. To put it in my own words: too much speech or too much music. What? Well, it stood between being a spoken word podcast with music or being a music show/podcast with some speech between the songs. The episode he listened to was about Civilization for the Amiga. I previously decided that all my speeches between the songs must be between 30-60 seconds, using old Swedish shows as a template. Not just Smoke rings, but also Svensktoppen and some other old time music shows. This was not bad, but I had missed one point: they all talked about the music. I spoke about games and retro stuff. Either you wanted to hear the stories for the whole episode or just the music with some notes.

Point was taken and I made the choice to primarily do demo top lists, artist presentations and just some talk about the music. This turned out to make the episodes more consistent. And it was needed for many reasons. Some episodes took 10-11 hours per week to produce. So, I had to streamline the whole thing. I ended up balancing between being a calm night-time DJ or a faster top list-presenting-dude depending on what the subject of the show was for the week.

I also had a “challenge-accepted” task in front of me: the request system. With the database getting more and more advanced, I decided the site must have a feature to search and request the tunes you want on the station. And it then had to play them for you automatically. This was a much bigger challenge than I had ever expected, but I got a working prototype up and running before Christmas. It was buggy and broke all the time, but when it worked, it was quite the thing. In early 2022 I finally had fixed the problems and the feature made ericade.radio the only PlayIt Live-based radio station capable of accepting automatic listener requests. The other stations may have had lots of actual listeners, but I had this feature! I declared epic win.

In the spring I used ModArchive’s toplists to make music style episodes of the podcast. All from rock, top, country to silly tunes. This was great until the genres ran dry. Gosh darnit. Always that one problem. In March I decided AGAIN to give the Amiga tunes their marching papers and remove them all. Then I rebuilt them in glorious mono, so the “audio split-vision” would go away. That was the very moment when I was finally happy with the sound of the station. What? Only took like 1 ½ year. And the happiness lasted for about 15 minutes until I felt the need to tune the broadcast processor again. “Because it sounded a bit off”. Probably some sort of “Audio OCD” on my part, but I have learned to live with it. And so have the listeners. It does sound better ever so often.

Demo season started and I covered the demos as dutifully as I could. Some demo organizers, or “orgas” as they like to call themselves, were helpful. Other were non-responding as in “who is this loser DJ who wants our compo-tunes the same day as the competition?”. I gave up in “the first station to play them” and started letting a week pass between the demo party and my episode about it.

The summer of 2022 focused on building the software and introduced the Discord-bot, that allowed the listeners to request tunes and show information about them directly in Discord. It was both awesome and a something of a novelty. Also, I missed live broadcasting from the Edison party due to health issues. But the podcast was still on.One day in the summer of 2022 I copied one old broadcast from 2021 and compared it to a brand-new hour from just a few days ago. Didn’t expect much difference. But it was like night and day. It was like comparing a computer with a broken sound card submerged into a fish tank with kersone in it with… Hmm… I lost my train of thoughts… Probably bound for New Hampshire. But I think I intended to say: all the work had been worth something. It sounded amazing in comparison. Mainly because the old audio sounded amateurish. Amiga stereo were never the glory moment of that venerable old computer. I’m just saying.

As july came to an end, I contacted the old timey BBS sysop Hravnkel and suggested a podcast collab and it became realiy as we sat for an hour and just chat about old memories from the Amiga past. It was a weird discussion about modems burning, pirates copying and why the demo scene could be so hostile. We also choose a few songs each to play and talk about. Superfunny to make and probably survivable to listen to.

Hi! Do you have some time to talk about the Commodore Amiga? She died for Mehdi Ali’s sins.

I was later invited to broadcast live from Commodore-klubbens event in early september 2022. And I did so for the first and a part of the second.

In August and September, I had to contend with my script and XMP being a problem. The solution was once great, but XMP on Ubuntu was ageing. Its library was older than metusalem and some Impulsetracker-tunes did not sound right. I had no idea how big this problem was until a demo scener explained it for me and played a copy of how it was supposed to sound. Good… It was supposed to sound good.

The XMP library ignored some of the volume commands. If you don’t know how the track is supposed to sound, it’s probably nothing you’ll think about. But in contrast, some tunes totally changed. I had to work hard to find a solution. It turned out to be OpenMPT and its command line tool OpenMPT123.exe. Now OpenMPT was (and is) in active development and could handle anything tracked you threw at it. The Linux machine was put out of its com-missery and I wrote an advanced PowerShell script to convert the tracked tunes into nice sounding music files in the FLAC format. That and I screamed and yelled a lot at the screen as I initially couldn’t get it to work properly. Have you ever worked with files with spaces in their names in PowerShell? It’s no fun. Ever. It makes you mad at the stars for shining.

We were now in the chilly months of fall 2022. In october the server crashed and had to be reinstalled from backups. We were gone for one week. No fun. A few weeks later I threw out the old WordPress website and replaced it with a small custom-made website. The reason why the old site annoyed me? Mostly because it was a chore installing your own code in it. I barely got the music list function to work, and when a user reported that it didn’t work in Firefox, I gave up.

Nice! Now all you Excel-jockeys have something to play with.

This new page came with a song statistics, a table where you could search for songs and finally it was faster. WordPress is nice, but you can’t call it fast.

In 2023 I moved from Solna to Kungsholmen and the rather complex recording studio I had built was now just a couple of unpacked boxes looking accusingly at me. This spelled the end of the weekly show at Saturdays at 9 pm. Thus this meant no more podcasts from the station either. But I missed recording those, so in april of 2023 I went through the daunting process of setting the whole thing up again and that led to the return of “Flashback, tracks from the past”. Now it was a monthly show and the 9 pm scheduled broadcast did not come back.

Development was pushed to the curb side and the station ran without that much interference from me. But then came a message from Coreus, our long standing listener and later on collaborator. He suggested that we should do a live broadcast from Edison 2023 together. A joint venture between ericade and his project retro.gg. I thought it sounded like a great idea and planning began. I dug out my old broadcasting computer, that I used for Edison 2021 and updated it.

All setup and ready to give you the demo scene!

So came summer and three DJs met in Stockholm. It was me, Coreus and his friend the Baron of Dubstep. On the 7h of July we entered the airwaves and did a heavily musicladen talkshow with interviews. This was done on location and live over the station. It was really fun. In the end we learned some bad news: the was to be the last Edison ever. The organizers had decided to stop doing the demo party. It was a decision they wisely reversed later, but by then it looked as if it was over.

Development of the station during 2023 was slow and the podcast episodes were few and far between. But the station operated and we had a small, but interesting Discord server with some listeners.

In august of 2023 as few “less than stellar individuals”, you know the ones we call hackers decended on the web site discord.io, and forced it to permanentely shut down and disappear. This was the service providing our invitation links to Discord. So no more people appeared on our Discord server. It wasn’t fixed until 2025, causing our Discord server to eventually go pretty silent.

In 2024 we knew that Edison was gone and this live broadcasting thing, was something I wanted to continue doing. Me and Coreus decided to set our sights on Pågadata 2024. This was a small demo party that was seen as a continuation of the Gubbdata party that had shutdown. In the summer we went to Örtofta in southern Sweden and broadcast live. It was a smaller demo party run by people that wanted to have fun and meet. It was great and we logged a number of broadcast hours with music and interviews.

This the 2025 model of website! Get it through your nearest car dealer.

The fall of 2024 led to a major improvement taking place. Coreus and I began replacing the old and aging website for the station. This “old” website would work, but looked really horrible on phones and on really big screens. Coreus took over the role as web developer and in early 2025 and a new website created by him rolled out and integrated the functionality of the old site with a modern and sleek web site design. It was black! Dark websites are awesome, there is always that.

In 2025 I got the news that the Edison demo party was coming back. This time, they had scrapped the old barn house in northern Stockholm for a big boat anchored in the Mälaren sea in the middle of Stockholm. It was the m/s Borgilla.

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you Coreus’s “Blobby”. Nah, I have idea what he’s supposed to be either. But he is an awesome critter!

Coreus and I decided to make a live broadcast from there. This time, there was a big difference. So far we had always been guests on every demo party we broadcast from. This time, the organizers of Edison gave us a role. We would be commentators and have a show where we presented the best competition tunes from all previous years of Edison. This was a welcome change, but there were a lot of extra work. We also provided the paus programming over Twitch. And we got comments from people watching the Twitch stream, that they enjoyed the interviews made with various sceners. And Coreus won the video competition and brought “Blobby” into the world in a cooperation with dem scene musician Alpa.

It was a successful thing except I made a screwup as a commentator. They had a competition with some games that the organisers showed to the sceners. Those games were all hard and the players failed swiftly at playing them and gave up without going anywhere. I thought that was funny and noted that “this didn’t go too well”. The listeners though I meant that the games were bad and I got some angry comments for that but was not told about it until later. Ouch! I hope noone is still mad at me for that faux pas.

The powers that be must have been happy with our work, as both me and Coreus were offered the role as part of the official organizers of Edison. It either that or they are short of people. We accepted the offer.

The calm was returning and we had to handle the backlog with the two Edison shows going up on YouTube. This took some time, but eventually happened.

This is an ancient, sacred scroll passed along by a group of ancient wizards.

I spoke with a fellow scener that mentioned that some of the demo scene sites had been struck by hackers. Most wellknown case was BitJam, that went dark after that. Then I got a real close shave when the request function failed one day. After investigating the problem, I noted that the song trying to play had an apostrophe in its name. This crashed the API. It was a classic SQL injection. That was a big security hole in the code. The affected part of the system was blocked from the Internet, so there were no real risk of it getting hacked. Still… Rather nasty thing to find if you ask me. I decided to go through the whole backend and leave no stone unturned.

I fought through my code over the coming three weeks to fix all problems I could find. It turned out to be no more security issues, but a number of annoying errors in functions and I pulled whatever hair I still had on my head out over it. When it was done I was very satisfied over finally sorted it out. This led to me improving the import of the songs as well and it ran much faster now. One thing led to another: I made a number of new Flashback episodes in short succession. The passion was back in a way.

In December of 2025, the Trifecta (Me, Coreus and the Baron of Dubstep) assembled again and talked about AI, Spotify and our favorite games from the past in the podcast.

In 2026 Flashback, tracks from the past was back as a weekly show and I set my sights on trying to do the magic spells of SEO. That’s not some sort of arcane spell to create wealth and prosperity. It was rather a good way to be found on Google and the podcast directories. It’s called “Search engine optimization” and that’s what all the cool kids are doing. So did we. If you search for stuff like chiptune, demo scene and retro computers, it’s great to be one of the first results on the ranking. The only thing better than that must be to be the first result for all things people type into Google. Any 1337 hax0rs out there who want to help me out?

The whole spring and early summer, I got the stations and the podcast registered on all directories and podcast services. I added all new, nice meta data that promised our podcast a sure ride to stardom. I added chapters, full transcription and all the meta tags you can throw a stick at. Did it work? Well, better at least.

In February, Coreus made some really vast updates to the website and fixed a lot of bugs and improved everything. The awesome new color was blue and had an optimistic view of a destroyed city under a sunny sky. It was true pixel graphics. Jay! Awesome-sauce. No AI-slop. AI-slop is bad, mmmmkay?

Revision 2026 was now a reality and in April of 2026, I and Coreus went to Saarbrûcken in Germany to broadcast live. And so was done. We played lots of great music and talks to sceners like Truck, Oilheap, Jenna (Minebrandon) and others while talking about the everything going on. From this, we created four long, and interesting podcast episodes.

The whole time, I and Coreus worked long night shifts to add a number of new features to the station. A progress bar, texts that told you what music was playing on Best of ericade.radio, statistics, Album graphics, tags and links to all social media we were featured on.

This is where the station is at today and I had to omit a lot of funny, good, and horrifying stories due to lack of time. But some of them shall be told when I find the time. Rest assured.

Am I a bad person? I just want one day without spammers trying to guilt-trip me into buying stuff I don’t need.

I have two podcasts and two radio stations. So unsolicited mail is to be expected. I have little problems with that, until the the people sending the mail continue try to solicit for a response even when I do not respond at all.

The final mail that made me snap

My response

Hello

I have decided to answer your barrage of mails. I don’t really think much of your services to be honest, but I will give you an answer based on experience and understanding of the subject matter at hand.

So, the question of the day is this: does search engine optimization really work? The short answer is no; it does not.

Allow me to build my reasoning here. I have two podcasts, one called “IT-säkerhetspodden” and the one you’re asking about “Flashback, tracks from the past”. They have very different strategies and results. Allow me to elaborate:

IT-säkerhetspodden

It was started in 2018 by me and a friend. It’s in Swedish and covers the area of IT-security. When it started, it had only two other competitors in the same area in Sweden. We hit it off to a good start already from the get-go. A few years in, I was able to get approximate listening from the biggest competitors. Then I compared to ours: we were 10% larger than the best performing competitor. In short: we were the largest IT-security podcast in Sweden. This is no longer true, as we are a bit behind in curve. We have yet to transition to the video format, and that is a problem today for an audio only podcast. But we can pretty much do whatever we want, with no significant loss of listenership. The SEO-angle? Pretty lack-luster. We have not even cared about SEO. No transcripts, no key words, no key word tracking and no description following any SEO strategies. A basic presence on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook and X/Bluesky). No titles optimized for anything at all. A dry website that only 6% of our listeners use. We live on the big podcast directories (Apple, Google, and Spotify). We still perform like the 1% largest podcasts in the world. This is because the curve is exponential. At 1000 unique listeners per one episode and week, we are that big. It says so little about anything except the overwhelming number of podcasts in the world get NO listeners. This is the sad truth. And no SEO in the world can change that.

Flashback, tracks from the past

Started in 2020 and has the format of playing chiptune- and demo scene music with short form narration by me. It covers demo parties (think digital arts festivals) and old games from the past. It has enormous competition. There are a lot of old CGM, chiptune and demo scene podcasts and stations sharing the small number of listeners that are available. Check terraplayer.com and see for yourself. It’s also a narrow (“drainpipe”) instead of a broad (“lake”) of a format, so to speak. It has had a dismal listening from starts as it competes with a narrow format in a totally saturated environment. And the scene has been set in its way for so long that it just isn’t viable to compete as most listeners already got their favorite spots since the early 2000s (long before podcasts, and when it was called “on demand audio). Yeah, I remember that. I started a now long-gone scientific show in 1997 (!) before there were broadband. So, to no surprise: it has almost no listeners. One month of all episode-listening, compares unfavorably with one (!) day of listening for one episode of my other podcast. I decided (unwisely, I know now!) to go full SEO gung-ho on this! I am a software developer by hobby, not trade. So, I read up on the problem and added all things you must have consistent tags, keyword tracking, transcription, the two worldwide supporter chapter namespaces in use and all relevant Podcasting 2.0 attributes needed for full SEO immersion. I started tracking key word usage with PEOSEO.com.

I am now months down the line and the uptick in listening, visibility and usage have been small. Noticeable, yes, but not worth the days and months of development and hard research has not been worth it. I am grateful for the experience, though. It was good to understand that SEO only works to improve an already well-performing podcast or website.

Here are two observations from me:

1. You should not compete

Another old curmudgeon by the name of Troed Troedsson taught me this lesson in his book “Don’t panic”.

If you want the listeners and then money, do not go into markets that are heavily saturated. That’s a lost cause. Sorry, no exceptions! If it works, it is because the conditions change. What was unpopular yesterday, can be popular tomorrow and vise-versa. This just how it works. No need to sugarcoat it or trying to sell a panacea for it. SEO can do nothing here. It’s not possible.

2. You must adapt

A very nice podcast that made an interview with me. They have video. Video is nice!

Today, video-based podcasts are more or less a requirement. If you still have only audio, you are not in the leader quadrant if I may say so. This was not so when I started. But the changes are there all right. Then there is AI and AI-requirements. If you leverage AI today, you can improve your chances somewhat. That’s just the rule of today. There are no ways around this.

Then again, who cares?

I and my friend have earned a pretty good amount from IT-säkerhetspodden during the years. We have interviewed the Swedish CEOs of IBM and Microsoft about AI years before it became the topic of the hour. We have talked with intelligence officers, IT-security gurus, and other people in the market. No SEO needed for that. I bought a subscription from Yoast for the site and learned to optimize the show notes for SEO. It did nothing for the visibility of the podcast and never showed a readable increase in the listening. It cost a lot of money and was irritating as hell for someone proud of being able to express himself with texts and articles.

And Flashback, tracks from the past is a lost cause. Who cares? I certainly do not. I have loved nighttime radio since I religiously watched “midnight caller” in the 80s. And now I present chiptune music and talk briefly about various demo scene topics for a small audience. Fine by me. I sure wanted more listeners, so I did the SEO dance and learned that all the promises were just a pocket full of mumbles, for so are promises. And I really come to expect that all I can do is to enjoy the process not some sort of pipe dream of “stardom” that cannot be the reason to do anything today. Timing is everything. And the time of demo/chiptune is not now. It was 25 years ago. This much is clear. I will continue working the recording desk for as long as I enjoy it, without expecting the non-existing chance of become some sort of influencer. What a stupid goal that is, anyway. The other pod can’t really give me that either. I seek no fame and not becoming some sort of brand name in myself. So, yeah, that’s the whole thing. The last leg of this journey comes here…

“Slkmediaagency” and the spam angle (UCE)

Right, this is the least funny part of the discussion. But we must go there. I’m in my 50s, so I have seen the whole modern IT-era unfold. Back in the 90s, I was a consultant and system administrator. I so the early era of spam. Hormel, the creator the Spam brand of compressed meat, did not like having their name associated with the annoyance that was unsolicited mail. They even had a page on their website stating that their product was Spam with a capital “S”. Unsolicited mail was spam with a non-capital “s”. If the purveyor of the least popular “food” you can eat wants nothing to do with you, maybe it’s time to listen.

Sanford Wallace, legendary spammer from days past.

Later, the spamming industry struck back with a new term called “opt out”., It simply meant “you receive our spam and tell us to stop” (unsubscribe). What a dick-move that turned out to be. But here we are now everyone thinks it should be the norm. And it is.

So why am I even complaining? Well, I get a lot of emails from people selling stuff to my podcasts and radio stations. I answer politely to people trying to get their music on them by noting we have no possibilities to play commercial music. Then there are all the “we can develop your website”-spams. I don’t ever respond. Most people use social media today, so websites are strictly window-dressing or maybe hobbyist projects. And then there is you. If you wonder why I haven’t responded, now you know. But you continued spamming harder with follow ups, while not knowing how easy they could be understood as mass-emails. My name is “Erik Zalitis” and my demo scener handle is “DJ Daemon”. So, my first name is NOT “DJ”. You are calling me that, which makes me understand that you are just trying to automatically spam as many people as possible, hoping someone will respond. And I do, with the only response I can give you: “Please stop spamming. I’m not interested!”.

You should have taken the hint when I dd not respond to the first five or so emails with incessant nagging from you.

I could have been rude, but I do not do that. I only observe that your aberrant behavior highly correlates with “dark tetrad” traits. I will leave the discussion with that and ask you to just go away now.

Stackoverflow Do you think this random avatar you assigned to me is appropriate? Seriously. Come on, do you have a sickle and hammer as well or maybe the Nod-insignia from Tiberium wars?

Whoever drew that abomination should be given their walking papers.

I am not sure, but I believe it was in 1984, when my audio/radio-romance begun. It happened as almost all my life-changing events do by mere coincidence. I went with my mother to an infamous, now defunct, flea market here in Stockholm and bought some antique 8mm movie equipment. Once I got home, I found out it was “double 8”, which I could not use with the films I had. The salesperson was recalcitrant to give me a refund but offered me something else worth the 20$ (200 sek) I had paid for it. Not knowing what to do, I pointed to an old open reel tape recorder. Once I got it home, I got a cheap microphone from an electronics store and set the whole thing up. My first recording was some chirping birds outside the window.

As I got several old vinyl players, cassette desk and an amplifier, I built my first own radio studio and recorded several radio shows with my very uncooperative neighbors, a few kids my age. They mostly did not want to say anything and asked me not to disturb them as they were busy reading comics. I already obsessed with audio and radio, and that never changed. The tapes are long lost, but they were not really that much of a master piece anyway. One of the shows had me shouting “I’m besieged” when I could not keep my brothers from entering my room. Also, I did not know how to pronounce it, as I only seen it in text. So, I shouted “I’m bes-eye-jdged”.

At night I slept with a radio in my bed, listening mostly to Swedish Radio Program 1 (P1). Sometimes the shows could be scary as they dealt with getting old and dying and that was no help with my sleep, that much I can tell you. I also remember tuning into Radio Luxemburg or listening to Swedish community broadcasts from SAF Radio City.

In 1991 I enrolled into second upper class school in Sweden (Brännkyrka gymnasium) and they had a couple of older students running a radio station called Radio B.R.I.E. I was hooked and listened every week at Wednesday through a home-built receiver.
Over the years, I tried to join the radio team. At first, they were interested, but I had a habit of being more than just a little bit into doing things my way, while being very energic and not listening to what other people said (I got much better over the years ). I believe they eventually didn’t really want me to join after all. But I remained a loyal listener and purveyor of “creative” jingles, made on my Amiga 500. They put some of them on the air, mostly to be nice to me. You, know, those jingles were… to put it mildly… not so good.

In 1994, I saw an ad for a community broadcasting activity for teenagers (and I was one of them, back then!). I joined them three times and every time made a new show that was heard over 95,3 MHz here in Stockholm in Sweden. I did not speak on the first show as I was the audio engineer, a job I loved beyond belief. The second one was the same, with two guys from school that spent most of the time joking and telling rude stories. They interviewed a person talking about Leonardo Davinci but spun out of control when she spoke about his sexual habits. The result was borderline catastrophe and it just had to be put on the air. The third session was just me and some BBS-sysops talking about all the unjustified fear mongering that was going on about our dear BBS:es. The radio studio was shut down that same year.

But at the same time, around February 1994, I was also involved in broadcasts on Radio Sydost 101,1 MHz. This was cut short after a month when they lost their studio due to unpaid dues.

In 1995 another project I had started finally came to fruition. I had long wanted the Swedish federation of young scientists (Förbundet Unga Forskare) to start broadcasts here in Stockholm. And on the 26th of February 1995, it went on the air on 88,9 MHz with the program “Radio Unga Forskare”. We were also one of the first broadcasters in Sweden providing on demand streaming in 1997. Today, this phenomenon still exists, but is now known as a podcast. We used to put out science shows and had a team of scientists and students doing weekly clips that ran on the radio and on the Internet.

In 1995 I took an old essay I wrote as a school project and started spreading it over the bulletin board systems of the day, while adding more text to it. This essay covered audio enginering and community broadcasting here in Sweden. The title of it alluded to the sci-fi book series “The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” and was thus called “The audio engineer’s guide to the galaxy” (Ljudteknikerns guide till galaxen). For a number of years, it was really popular. But it’s just an archive now, I guess.

This is a story all by itself, but it ended in 2006, as I had no more time and wish to continue. At our height, we had 10-15 persons regularly contributing to keep the station running.

After that, I found my love for listening to radio rekindled as streaming radio was becoming a common thing. Then I bought a CB radio kit and found it to be quite boring as no one really was on the frequencies. 2011 I took the step and finally became a radio amateur (Ham radio). I took up shortwave listening but lost interest as the number of stations dwindled.
During all this time I dreamt about starting a YouTube-channel.

In 2018, a friend tried to get me to start a podcast with him. This DID happen, and as I write this, it’s still running.

The podcast, IT-säkerhetspodden, has been quite a journey. While a fairly popular niche-podcast in itself, it has taught me and Mattias a lot about interviews, audio editing, microphones, writing better texts, meeting people, using social media to get listeners and web site design. Not to mention digital imaging and keeping everything running during half way impossible dead lines.

In September 2020 I bought the software “Playit live” and setup a real 24/7 radio station with a lot of old Amiga music, professional jingles (Yes, I finally know how to make jingles that don’t suck!) and funny little messages from me.

It runs on an old PC located on my balcony. You can listen to it here. It has been a lesson in how to properly format a station with clocks, scheduled, recurrency and Internet streaming.

So I have in some capacity been into nearly all radio there ever was. As a broadcaster, as an avid listener and as an engineer. It should be told, though, that I have never held a paid position in the business.

As I listen to my oldest shows and to what I do today, it is clear I have really improved. Anything else would have been strange, so all those years listening to radio, creating radio and recording the spoken word has really given me something.