Short answer: synthwave, chiptunes, tracked music and retro electro. Please enjoy a trip down memory lane.

Longer answer: If you want to understand what this station is about, consider the following story:

“It was another time”, as they use to say to excuse or accept bad stuff. But this was not the case with the old classic home computers of the 80s and 90s. This was a time of wonder and trying to do with the limited resources that was available. A whole generation learned Basic and then some struggled with assembly language. A new breed of graphics artists, musicians, programmers and authors used the computers of the time as a platform of development. This is off course how it is even today, but it was here where it started. We’ve asked ourselves many questions in order to understand what the revolution would mean for us: the users, the programmers and the hackers of the day.

One final question remains: my god, has it been this long? Yes, in fact it has! The Amiga came into this world in 1985, and that’s 35 years ago in 2020. The original Soundtracker was a commercial application that emerged in the 80s, and spawned a revolution all by itself. It allowed anyone to create songs with sampled music requiring almost no experience. Soundtracker was quickly outmaneuvered by a lot of Shareware clones like Noisetracker and Startrekker to name a few. And suddenly music came streaming out of Paula, the only soundcard/chip the Amiga ever had or needed. Then came the PC and added more channels and better samplers, suddenly we had Impulsetracker, Fasttracker and various other fantastic tools to make the music the artist created even more magic.

And now, you can hear the fruit of their labor. Tunes, mostly sampled, that brings back the many talents fostered by the home computer revolution we just talked about.

How did this “tracker music” thing get started?

When Karsten Obarsky wrote his software “the ultimate soundtracker”, he could not have guess what he just set in motion. The year was 1987 and the Amiga was that HOT computer everyone want. Alas, his software never sold well and the format was stolen by others. And as unfair as it may be, they succeeded where he did not.

The journey was long, but today we have everything from old school Protracker for the Amiga to Impulsetracker firing on all 64 cylinders. Tracked music has come a long way.

Who is DJ Daemon?

Me? Just an old man with the old world blues and a history in community broadcasting. Yet again I sit in front of the microphone and present you the wonderful tracked music of yesterday and today.

Me in 1997. Amiga geek very-ordinaire, Erik Zalitis, formerly known as Daemon hosts the 24/7 show that takes you back 30 years to the days of home computers, BBSes and music made on the Amiga, Atari and PC. Me in 2022.

Me in 1997.

Me in 2022.

Why did you create a radio station?

Crazy story, really. Here it is!

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.

What you mean “retro hoarder?” I just have like 7 Commodore computers.

In 2021, I wrote an article about how I make the podcast “Flashback, tracks from the past”. But it covered how I work with demo parties and the demo top lists I make. Most of the episodes nowadays are just me playing great tracked music. I still make demo scene episodes, but the most common shows are much faster to produce and feature more music instead of stories and interviews. This is because my experience is that the listeners prefer music over story telling. So, with no further ado, here is how your typical weekly show is made.

Step 1 – Getting all the cool music

When I started, I had a stash of 1000s of Amiga tracker modules. I used it to feed my radio station and later the first episodes of the podcast. It worked until I had run through all the good tunes and needed more than that. Thankfully, I found Modarchive. The site not only saves those tracked tunes for posterity but is also curating then. Inadvertently I started pushing non-Amiga tunes into the station. This eventually forced me to accept that it would not be 100% Amiga. But as true meritocracy goes, it made sure that I got the best of the best when it comes to tracked music.

This is probably how most people got in contact with chip tunes. Remember the old cracked games, which included a key generator for the license key? It came with music, a bad conscience and loads of malware. Not really missing that era, but the music was great!

What’s tracked music? Don’t they all call it “chip tunes” nowadays? Aaaaaaaaargh!!!! We must stop doing that. Not every tracked song is a chiptune. But that’s where we are now, so I guess I must accept “chip tunes” being a blanket term for anything sounding the least bit blippety-bloppety. But I digress…

I need one hour of tracked music. That would be about 20 songs, and I happily must venture to Modarchive.

Sweet! Give me my tracker music fix now!

Modarchive has a few good sources for music thanks to the “curator” approach they have to it. I start out by looking through the highest rated songs. Those that have 10 out of 10 in the rating. I also go through the “Most revered” list, where members has voted for their all-time favorites. In 2022 I used the genre lists to create a few themed episodes going through pop, rock, novelties and classic music.

Today I rely on the weekly spotlit songs that have been selected by the administrators on the site because they’re above and beyond the normal tunes. So, I bring up the latest tunes to be selected for that honor.

Let’s get it started from here. I now load up every entry in a separate tab on my browser until I have enough candidates or my browser comes crashing down. Then it’s time to listen. This takes a while. Just because it’s supposed to be good, doesn’t mean it cuts the muster. The station and the podcast have a sound and a format that requires the songs to fit when it comes to quality, genre and style. This takes a while and is done by the patented “wham, bam, thank you ma’m”-process. That is, I click, listen and either download the song or not and then I go to the next song. To see if I got enough tunes, I load them into VLC. Don’t worry, I will never use VLC to convert the tunes. It’s only to see how many minutes of music I have. As soon as the total time exceeds one hour, it’s time for the next step.

Step 2 – cooking after the recipy

Great! A pile of tunes, what do I play them with?

VLC is a poor choice of player for tracked music. There, I said it, now I feel better. Why? Because the batch conversion features are buggy as you wouldn’t believe and it cannot play a lot of the tunes right. Sorry, the playback of Impulsetracker tunes is useless. It doesn’t support all effects, so tunes won’t sound the way they should. I learned that the hard way. It’s a great player for playing normal mp3-files, though.

An excerpt from a mail conversation between me and an orga from a popular demo party in the southern hemisphere. He clearly knows that this is a problem as well. Just so you know it isn’t just me thinking so.

My tool of choice is: OpenMPT. To be more specific, the command prompt version of it, called openmpt123.exe. I have created a script to handle batch-conversion of whatever type of tracked tune it is to a set of nice flac-files. Flac is lossless compression, so it retains the quality of the original sound. Did I say that? Since when have tracked music has ever had good sample quality? Most earlier tunes of the Amiga-era are cobbled together in the artist’s mother’s basement by nerds with Cindy Crawford posters on their walls. They know how to make great music, but recording samples is another thing altogether. Back then most samplers for the Amiga did not have any meters or indicators to allow for recording at a good recording level. The rest, as they say, is history.

Built like a tank and about cutting though modules like one as well.

The conversion script not only converts the tunes, it also normalises the levels and creates meaningful meta data.

The album field is super important. The OrginalName is the name of the file when it gets imported. The website uses the file ending to figure out what kind of format I’m playing. This song ends with .xm, so it was created in Fastracker or one of its clones.

This is what the station looks like on a friend’s webradio. Does anyone still use those, by the way? Note that ericade.radio tells the listener that it is an Amiga 4-channel module. Now you know how that works. Cool.

PlayIT Live is the broadcast automation program I use to make the station tick. It runs 24/7, creating the playlist for the two stations I have. It’s also used to create the show that later becomes the podcast episode. Now I must upload the newly created tunes to the station. This copies them to the broadcast server and adds them to the repositories. Repo-what? Yes, that’s the list of available tunes used to create the play lists and make the stations work.

Let’s look at one of the tunes on the broadcast server.

So, do you see anything missing from the picture of the tune? Yup, the artist’s name isn’t there. There is no artist field on any format of module I know of. So, it says “Trackerartist”. That’s the next 30 minutes of fun for me. That is trying to figure out who wrote the tune. Sometimes the comment/instrument-list helps. And sometimes I must go to Modarchive or Google for it. Every now and then there is an artist with such bad self-esteem they choose to remain anonymous or something like that. They then get to keep the name “Trackerartist”. The tune above is by “Psirius”, and I then update that field.

It’s super important to make sure all artists are typed in the same way, so the listings show up correctly on the station and in the podcast play list.

See! Just by listing the artist correctly, the name is lining up nice in the list of available music on the station.

So, the million-dollar question: does the music appear on the station? The beauty of the whole setup is that it totally does. I have uploaded it to the same broadcasting server that plays the 24/7 stream, meaning it will enter the station when I create a new podcast episode. Not a mistake, but the intended effect. The podcast is a structured way for me to add new music to the station regularly.

Onwards, we got even more fun in the pipeline.

Step 3 – DJ Daemon has entered the building

Meet Leisa Wolfe, the broadcasting server. I have no idea why I choose to call her that. It’s like a captain naming his ship. It has to be a woman’s name. I just really have no method of selecting one. I guess it sounded good at the time. That was like in 2020 or so. Nevermind… Anyway, what you see is the broadcast automation. And also the very same tool I use to create the podcast, which always starts as a show on the station and then later becomes a podcast. Greatness.

So, I go to the 18:00 clock, which is the Swedish way of saying 6 pm. I then remove all the tunes set to play at that time and then I disable the scheduler. PlayIT Live fears vacuum and happily fills the gap with new songs before I have the time to add my own. It’s probably a good idea to turn it back on when done, or the station eventually goes silent when it runs out of scheduled hours. Dead air is a mess, and you lose listeners that way. All DJ:s have horror stories of that.

Ok, I open the ingest group, which is where I put on the new files I just imported in the station. Then I put them in the correct order. Which is that anyway? Well, I first try to find that tune that sounds like a starter. Yes, that’s a thing for any station. You want to start your show with a bang! And there is always at least one of the tunes that sounds like it’s the perfect starter. Then I try to select fitting tunes to create variety. If two tunes are slow and beautiful, I try to select something like an up-tempo techno tune as the next one. I also try to mix styles and make the play list (or “clock” as we call it in the radio business) become varied and never become boring. This is hard to get right as I only have like 20 songs or so. But it certainly helps to make it a more compelling show even if I can’t make it perfect.

The short tunes (less than 3 minutes) are put in a section of the play list called a “medley”. This is a play order that does not get interrupted by my speech. It will become a mix of tunes that fill up the same time as one normal length tune would. I make sure to put in a jingle between one of them to “tag” the show. Then I tighten the segues. No, not that useless bike thing. That would be a “segway” and nobody cares about them anymore. A seque is a mix between two songs.

With this done, it’s time to insert the voice tracks. What? Yeah, sorry. Maybe I should explain what it is. A voice tracking software allows the DJ to talk between the songs. When he does, he only sees the end of the previous song and the start of the next. Those entries first show up as “Voice track Placeholder” because they’re empty. I then sit by the recording desk, that’s connected to the broadcast server and record every speech between the songs. Since I can record them in rapid succession, I have no need to wait for a song to play through before I record the next one.

This still takes time as I often have to make retakes to get it right. I’m no born speaker, I guess…

The playlist shows approximate times for each song, but I learned not to trust them perfectly when speaking. The last thing is to make sure to tighten the segues to get a mix without any interruptions. Now, I’m finally done with the whole show and take a backup of the list just in case PlayIT Live decides to pull the rug from under my feet. It does this every now and then. The software costs money, but the bugs are free. Since I started the station, I have sent a steady stream of bug reports to various software vendors that makes the station work (except when it doesn’t) It’s a bit of a slow Saturday morning hobby of mine.

Then I turn my focus to the broadcasting server. I start recording the station output to a wav-file to have something to create a podcast out of. PlayIT Live has some sort of mixdown feature that creates the show from the play list, but I have not yet tested if it can be used to speed the process up. All right!

The station is loud. In techno babble jargon, it’s close to -11 dB LUFS. This is the average level for the audio going to the stream encoders. There are louder stations on the Internet, but I have selected it to make a decent compromise between sounding weak and blowing out your speakers. This is however too loud for a podcast, which should be at -14 dB LUFS according to YouTube. It’s a negative scale, so -11 is louder than -14. So, I instruct the broadcast processor to calm down a bit and give me softer compression.

No, it’s not a psychedelic version of Microsoft Excel. This is the broadcast compressor (Thimeo Stereo Tool) that makes sound loud and makes sure you don’t have to adjust the volume knob between the songs. Those are the only purposes of it, really. What more do you want?

At 6 pm central European time, the station hits the fixed time marker that stops what is playing and starts the station id. “Time for another episode of Flashback, tracks from the past with your host DJ Daemon”. Then the first voice track starts playing and my voice comes on. A listener once said that I have a “rusty voice”. Really? I have no idea if it was an insult or some sort of admiration of my skills as a DJ. But there you go. I try to make my speeches short, because the listeners are here for the music, not me. The first tune now comes blaring through the speaker.

I then turn to Gimp and open my podcast template to create the cover art of the podcast.

Lemmings! I love Lemmings. Expecially nuking the lot of them when I can’t beat a level. Wait up, is he doing a mike drop???

It’s 7 pm and the station returns to playing music without my voice in between the songs. I reckon the listeners let out a collective sigh of relief. My work is not done yet. I return the broadcast processor to its normal level of smashing down the nails that are the audio levels. Then I copy the recordings of the show to the recording desk. This then gets loading into Audacity.

This is where “we fix it in post”. That is IF it can be fixed at all.

Now I cut the off the part preceding the start of the show and the ending. I also have to lop off the intro station id and replace it with a new one from my stored files. Otherwise, the podcast will start with the last part of the song playing when it starts on the show. The tail end gets a nice fade out. And I then save the whole show to an mp3- and a FLAC-file. They’re then tagged with information about the show.

Now I upload the mp3-file to the web server, and the FLAC-file goes into the ingest directory of the second station (“Best of ericade.radio”). PlayIT Live picks up the show and I manually start it on that station. This will send a call to the web site API, which creates an entry in the tune database that powers the web site. It’s not enough to make it show up. For this, I have to enter data in the missing columns of the entry in the table in the database.

Time to pull the playlist from the broadcasting server. I put it into Excel and format it. Then I put the formatted text into Ultra edit and do some search and replace to get the correct timestamps and name of the fields.

Text processing at its best! No pesky formatting.

Then I run another script that merges the FLAC-file and the picture I created in Gimp. This merged file becomes the mp4-file that YouTube needs. You cannot upload mp3-files to YouTube as they will not be accepted. This is a video with one static image and the whole show playing. You can do so true magic with ffmpeg and PowerShell.

I might have been a tad bitter, when I programmed the script.

Now I upload the file to the YouTube channel and hope for the best. YouTube checks for copyrighted music and sometimes fires off one of its many false copyright warnings. I really try to vet the files before putting them on, but there are times when some file slips through the cracks. And there are all dumb warnings that simply are not copyright infringements. It fires wildly and often gets it wrong. I use Spotify to find the songs it sometimes marks and they’re often false. Sigh.

Then comes the work to write a short copy, which is a description for the show. I then add the text to the YouTube video and test the time stamps, so you can jump between the songs and my speeches.

Maybe a bit boring with the same picture for every chapter, but it’s a radio show you see. Nothing visual going on.

Almost there after like four hours of work. I now fill the entry in the database with playlist info and data. It will not only show up on the web site, but it will also appear in the RSS feed that powers the podcast aggregators.

Does it work?

Yes, it totally does. In a few hours, all podcasting sites will follow suite and display the episode. Except Spotify that will delete it and yell at me for trying to uplöad copyrighted material. They’re worse than YouTube of getting this wrong.

Podchaser finds the episode and probably features it in double copies. There is something dearly wrong with their RSS parser. I have stopped going through the trouble of reporting this to them. The other sites have no problems with my feeds.

Are we done yet? You would think so, but not yet. Now I must spread the word on Discord servers, Facebook groups and other social media. Not forgetting the station’s own social media channel. This takes time and I must select the correct place to advertise on, so I don’t spam.

Are we done now! Yes, that’s correct. Now it’s time to shut everything down (not the broadcast server ffs!) and open a brewski.

Remember you can talk to us! Click here to go to our server on Discord.

13th of September will mark the fourth birthday of the The ERICADE Radio Network. If you wonder, two years ago I wanted to change the name to ericade.radio, but replacing all the StationIDs would simply be too expensive. So ericade.radio is now the short name instead. Anyway… I’m proud to call this a radio station, which may weird, when everyone else thinks of streaming music as little more than a playlist generator. This is not wrong, but it is missing why a true radio station is so much more than Spotify’s radio feature or a YouTube-channel promising “Synthwave, chipwave, retrowave … something, something the dark side”. Ahem… IT’S CALLED TRACKED MUSIC!!! Oh, anyway. What makes ericade.radio a radio station, is exactly what makes any radio station just that. Three words: format, idents, clock

Format

Simple! Just play the same kind of music. If listeners stop listening because they like the station, but there are so many bad songs on it, you need to tighten the playlist. With tracker music, this means getting an ear for what “sounds right” when sifting through new songs. I have rejected songs I loved, but I felt that they would never fit. So bad does not necessarily mean that it’s horrible to listen to. My work is to “curate” the music. A decent estimate suggests there are 200,000 Amiga 4-channel tracked songs still available on the Internet. Ericade.radio has little over 2000 songs, but they’re all tested by me and often gets stars from listeners. This way a lot of thought is put into it. And the most popular trackers we play music from are: Amiga 4-channel module – 43.3% Fasttracker – 27.4% Impulsetracker – 13.8% Modern remix – 5.3% Screamtracker – 3.8%

Idents

All radio stations must identify themselves. This is pretty much a universal law and goes for radio amateurs, beacons, repeaters, and broadcasting stations. In Sweden, amateur stations must “regularly” identify themselves. In the United States, the home of radio, stations are assigned call signs starting with K or W. So, the station must announce its call sign something like “You’re listening to KJCM 106.7” or “This is KRUD 98.5 on your FM dial”. Idents automate this and have evolved into “Station IDs” that may say things like “This is WTHX – the voice of Podunk, Texas” or “You’re tuned to WWTF – The leader in Black metal-country ballads”. If you have ladies with pretty voices singing the station call-sign and the slogan, that is a “jingle”. If the call sign and slogan is stated by a burly man with testosterone poisoning and is heard in the beginning of a song – that is called a “Sweeper”. Idents must be carefully selected and not be too long, inadvertently funny or just bad. They are the audio logotypes of the station. We used to have Nicole Carino, now it’s a British DJ that goes by the name of Jono Woodward.

Clock

Imagine a round plate with two … Ah, you know how an analog clock looks. Now, what if I pull of the second- and hour-hands? The clock face would now just show you the minutes. This is the brain behind a true radio station. It resets when the minute hand strikes twelve. Therefore, we talk about “top of the hour”. This automatically starts a new hour and is unimaginatively called a “clock”. You can have different clocks for different parts of the day or weekdays. A clock running on Friday evening would probably have up-tempo music, while Sunday afternoon clocks plays more mellow music. A clock is thus a list of what to play at a given time during the hour. This means that you can draw a clock face and then put slices for each tune, advert or ident that is supposed to play at that time. This is never exact, but the order is always preserved.

Ericade.radio is an Internet station, so it will not care that much. I’ve decided to assert the local, Swedishness of the station by having four clocks. They each state: “Good morning”, “Good mid day”, “Good afternoon” and “Good evening”. The station voice, Jono Woodward complained about the “Good mid day”-one, as English countries don’t say that. In Sweden we do. Since I paid for the idents, he complied. All clocks here play the same kind of music, as it would be too much work trying to shape the mix and, on the Internet, it would not matter too much anyway. But professional stations will put a lot of effort into “dayparting” as this is called. They also instruct the software to build tempo transitions by choosing songs that ramp up the tempo and then drop it. I don’t have the time to rate all songs based on speed and texture. Texture is the complexity of the song. Low textured songs have few instruments, and high textured ones can be more like symphonies. Ericade.radio makes use of clocks as must be done but does not really daypart or mix the tempo. Trivia: when Beatles released “Hey Jude” in the late 60s, stations did not want to play it, but were forced to due to its immense popularity. The problem was that it’s around eight minutes long. A clock is historically built around a song being 2-4 minutes and that up to 15 songs fit in an hour. Ad breaks and idents may change this. So that’s what makes a station? Well, it’s more like the “tenements” of the station. I will talk more about the other things in later posts. But I want to briefly point out one more thing that a true radio station must do. And that the playlist channel of the kind you hear on YouTube will not.

Process the audio

Loudness is a touchy subject for any audio guy or gal. But I believe it comes down to:

• Consistency (Same darn sound levels all the time!!!)
• Proper loudness (It needs the oumph!)

All songs I put on the station will be automatically normalized to -11 dB to a full-scale output (LUFS), which is a fancy way of saying “darn tooting loud”. This means that songs recorded too low will be “lifted up a bit”. The broadcast software (PlayIt Live) will then set it to a reference level of -16 dB LUFS, which is a bit more like “somewhat, but not too loud. My hearing aid is bad”. This means that the idents, my speech, and the songs will have a consistent level. But this is only the beginning. Time to get REALLY LOUD.

The station will at this time play at the same level over time. But the proper loudness is not yet there. There are many broadcast processors out there. I’ve chosen Thimeo Stereo Tool and bought all the licensed modules bar the ones used for AM or FM-processing. The audio gets in and get levelled right and then repeatedly smashed by three big hammers until marches in an orderly line in perfect columns. Those hammers are called “compressors”. To give you an idea of what this means, while using a huge over exaggeration: it makes a hair pin dropped to the floor and an atom bomb blast next door sound the same level. That’s a sacrifice as it means quality can suffer. Badly processed stations sound “pumpy” as peaks in energy (think drumbeats!) pushes the whole song down and then it slowly returns. Listen to NRJs stations here in Sweden to hear just how bad this can be.

And yes, the segues. Not the weird bikes, those are called “Segways”. A segue is how a track mix over to another. And a true radio station must allow no gaps between them! This sounds unprofessional and really “just a mere playlist”. The CUE-points is what sets the point at which the segue must start. This is done automatically, but I must check them before they go on the air. Pushing new songs into the station is the whole idea behind “Flashback, tracks from the past”. But I will save that story for another day. Four years on the air – a huge thank you to all of you supporting the station. You know who you are. Again, thank you.

Links and credits

KRUD Radio – a parody of a typical US station. And all other stations as well if you ask me. The radio clock: by Unknown author, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64214483

I started my latest radio station project 10 months ago. It’s still running to this day but is still a small outfit with a limited number of listeners. You must understand that currently, getting people to pay attention is harder than ever, as everyone is into streaming, podcasting and blogging. A friend of mine spoke about “eyeball time”, but in radio we can talk more about “ear lobe time” instead.

When I started my first broadcast ever in 1994, I had no idea about timing. But it slowly came to me just how little time you have to speak before listeners go away. For this discussion, I will talk about music stations as they are the most heavily affected by this. A talk station is supposed to provide spoken material and some station have a relaxed 2-3 minutes of speech between the songs. It depends on what you are creating.

My station plays tracked music made on Amigas, PCs and Ataris. People tune in for the music mix. When I started Voice tracking the first days, I noted in horror that people turned off as soon as I started speaking. This I know, as Internet broadcasting, let us you see disconnects and unfollows. Was something wrong with my voice. Apparently not. I simply had to relearn old lessons from my years in broadcast during the 90s. I did not understand the rules of this station as I thought about making it a mix between stories from the past and great music. it wasn’t working.

i started timing myself, and gave me a most 30 seconds to speak, but swiftly understood that even that was too much. I ended up speaking between 5-20 seconds with the odd voice track going all the way to 30.

I also decided that the clock should allow three songs to pass without voice tracks, jingles or messages. So, my live shows/voice tracked had me speak four times per hour. This and shortening the messages and the jingles down did the tricks. Disconnects during all non-music events went down close to zero. That was a painful lesson, but a necessary one.

It may not be the proper solution for everyone, but it seems to be a general rule. I remember getting the message during the 90s with a caller waiting to be put on the air. I spoke for 40 seconds of an event and as I put the next song on and came back to her, she said something like “Gosh, you really say a lot on the air”. This was a rather dire warning, but heeded, eventually. Then forgotten and relearned.

For everyone trying to nurture a cool voice, attitude, and persona: please do not forget the best you can do, speak less!

After a while, the whole setup gets a bit messed up, as you have to contend with people moving tables, reconnecting stuff after some mishaps or the whole setup being messy from the start.

For all you TLDR;-people, here is the executive summary:

• PlayIt Live (the broadcasting software) priority streams promises awesomeness.
• … and delivers it, although some improvements can be done.
• Many important lessons were learnt… Number seven will shock you.
• There is no numbered list, hence no “number seven”. But I did get your attention, didn’t I?

The situation

I wanted to broadcast live from the Edison Party 2021 in northern Stockholm and thus decided to make it happen. A demo party is a convent where the geeks show their cool music-, art-, programming- and retrocomputingskills.

The equipment

In the studio: PlayIt Live 2.09 on a physical server with Shoutcast and OBS Streamlabs. All setup and running. An IPSEC-based VPN to reach it from the outside. The instance is licensed for Voice tracking, advanced scheduling and remote management.

Portable (on site): A laptop with an Intel I7, 16 GB Ram and a 500 GB SSD HD. A local copy of PlayIt Live 2.09 just for live assist. Rocket broadcaster to generate the 192 kbps Icecast stream. JBB broadcaster just to deliver a decently normalized (through compression, though) signal. (This was before PlayIT Live got this feature). A 4G mobile access point and “modem”.

Physical audio equipment: a Shure SM7B microphone connected to a Rode Rodecaster Pro mixing console that was connected to the laptop. The local PlayIt live signal mixed with the microphone in the Rodecaster mixer and sent back to the laptop where Rocket Broadcaster can pick it up and send it to the to the server in the studio. Also, a pair of Audio-Technica headphones connected to the mixing console.

“ON Air”-listening: A mobile phone connected to a pair of Bluetooth headphones to listening to the station “on the air”. This signal is delayed 20 second due to Internet broadcasts buffering a lot. It cannot be done otherwise without a proper FM signal which is beyond my capabilities to get. I listened to it between my speeches to hear that the broadcast still worked.

The preparations

I set it up in my living room/kitchen area the week before testing it. The test was successful, and I saved the setting to make sure it would work on the broadcast date.

The journey

I live in Solna in northern Stockholm and Eggebygård, from where I intended to broadcast from does as well. I arrived on location on the 9th of July 2021 shortly after 3 pm. I had not announced this broadcast as I wanted to have a bit of freedom when to start.

The broadcast

I started the Broadcast on 4 pm exactly and it worked for a minutes before starting to stutter and eventually it broke, and the normal broadcast resumed. The reasons were 1) Windows not understanding this was a mobile connection as the 4G modem was connected to the laptop with USB. Syncing 1 GB of data over OneDrive is not a good thing to do. 2) Me uploading a 5 MB picture to Discord thinking the connection would not be affected. It was.

At 4:32:58 PM I started the jingle for the third time and hoped it would stay stable. It did! Nicole Carino’s voice now came out booming from the loudspeakers in all the radios around the world: “The ERICADE Radio Network – We’re now going live from a remote location”.

It was a smooth start this time and went on well most of the time.

Lessons learnt / post-mortem analysis:

• It is super-fun to do radio the proper way. No voice tracking. I am riding the sliders again. Jay!

• Knowing that you are still on the air is hard. You listen to the sound from the mixing console and hope all is ok. The “on air” button will show if the connection is lost, but not if it is on but struggling and the sound is cutting out all the time.

• Listening to the on-air signal through the other headphones connected to the live stream works fine. But a few times I almost missed the song endings as I was not thinking about the 20 second delay and still wore the “wrong” headphones as the song ended. This was fixed by me only using the “on air” headphones only during the beginning of the song and remembering to change the headphones well before the song ending. This must be possible to fix. I am thinking of some kind of “Dorrough-meter” AIR-check system. Back to the drawing board!

• MP3-compression damages the sound. A live broadcast means starting with a 320 kbps MP3-song, streaming it as 192 kbps to the broadcast system and the having it compressed a third time between the server and the listener. Despite this, the audio was quite good in the broadcast. Radio has never been about HIFI.

• Audio compression is also a thing to consider. Initially I set JBB up to work with a large portion of hysteresis/density. This caused my voice to sound very “breathless”. Dialing it back a bit and letting the master compressor (StereoTool) in the studio handle it made it much better. In the future, PlayIT will fix this with the new loudness feature. The I can use the Rodecaster Pro onboard mike-compressor and PIL to get the levels right within reason before it’s handed of to the master compressor.

• I need more people on this. Being the sole guy to control everything can be super stressful. Especially if something goes bad.

• PlayIT live is super stable and does nothing wrong during the whole broadcast. However, the Priority streams may need a bit of work. A few loose ideas:

o A buffer size/time setting in order to handle connections with latency and/or that are unstable.
o A visual problem indicator could send back a message that “The stream works but is choppy/unstable”. This could be sent as messages through the web browser popping up a warning in the notification area.
o A new feature: “max retries before giving up accepting the stream”, that would help cutting the stream off before the listeners give up on the whole thing.
o Maybe a “I’ll let you try again in X minutes” feature as well.
o A log of stable/unstable stream events would be very useful. “6:20PM Stream has entered the unstable state. 6:25 Stream has entered the stable state again. During the unstable phase, 4711 lost packets were recorded, 150 stutters etc.”.

• This can probably be downscaled to just a laptop and a USB microphone, mixing the whole thing in software (Voicemeeter). But it’s a bit of a buzzkill. I want a physical mixing console!

• Can it be made into a wearable? Then you are basically a broadcasting cyborg.

• Listeners are not tolerant. I missed two song endings with a few seconds of dead air as a result (see above for an explanation why). Each time it cost me a few listeners. I guess the others were not in the room when it happened. This has been the way it is ever since radio was invented and you had more than one station to listen to. I will never be different. Get used to it, man.

• PlayIT live can be hard to read at times. If the song reaches its cue out point and the segue is set to “Stop”, the countdown stops at 00:00 with the song still fading out. I learned to wait a few seconds before lifting the fader after that.

• I love the new “angry red” blinking feature of the player that is almost at the end of the song, that is in the beta 2.10! It would have helped if it was out when I did this. Next time it will.

• I made it a bit of thing complaining about the beer truck not arriving in time. This was mostly a joke as I know better than getting drunk during broadcast. My mother was in the TV business for many years and told stories about how drunk some of the hosts were during broadcasts. One of our most famous radio hosts here in Sweden was a big alcoholic as well. Soooo… There is nothing good about mixing anything else than sound during broadcast. Especially if it gets in the mixing console… I had my food and drink on another table adjacent to the one I used for broadcasting. Ok, the picture below says something else, but that was during setup and the mug was empty.

• I just got one interview made during the show. And it went quite well. The guy I spoke with had a great set of humor and kindly explained the party quite well.

• It is a bit tough to know what songs that you have played if you manually populate the list and broadcast for many hours. (This is true!) I wrote a radio automation software in 1999 that eventually had a featuring tell you when a song was last played. This meant you never risked playing the same tune twice during a long broadcast or that was chosen automatically during the day.

• Placement of the 4G modem and how many other people there are in the build using Mobile phones is a thing to really consider. In the future, a directional antenna is probably necessary. This ended up being a problem on broadcasting day two. But was solved quickly.

• A prepping mentality is needed. Try to duplicate everything that will make it impossible to broadcast if it fails.

• Bring water in a bottle, a multitool, gaffer tape, a big bag of patience.

• Getting a feel for the proper amount of time to speak between the songs is good. But I still back this up with classic old digital chronometer from time to time. This is mostly a station policy thing. But I speak 10-20 seconds between every fourth song during the normal broadcast. And 30 – 60 seconds between every song on the podcast episodes or the remote live broadcasts.

• Modern Internet-streaming means you get to see when listeners disconnect. Use that to learn, but do not become neurotic about it.

• Using a Rodecaster Pro? Good! Get a cover lid and the battery power option. You know you want to.

• Record everything locally as well Especially stuff you want to reuse. Do not just rely on reference taping.

• I probably forgot something important in this list. Also, someone will complain loudly about something I did/failed to do/should have done/is not true radio/is probably not best-practice/makes me an idiot. But hey, why not just accept that you do not stop learning as long as you live, and you don’t truly live when you stop learning.

Summary

It was quite an experience broadcasting live after this many years. There were some challenges, but I could handle them.

Listening to the broadcast, I think it was mostly very good. The dropouts were few, my speeches were decently short and informative, and the music was nice. I sometimes stutter a bit when speaking as I am not a native English speaker. And there are occasional grammar problems and the odd malapropism. And yeah. A pretty Swenglish dialect. But, hey, it is what it is…

Listen to the broadcast on YouTube