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| How could I possibly describe Radio Deja Vu (RDV) and Yesterday Once More (YOM) internet radio any better than by quoting the words to "Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters"? | ||||
| Purpose | ||||
| Currently, RDV and YOM are considered just a hobby. Allowing me to try different ideas, to bring back those memories and to see if either RDV or YOM can eventually pay for themselves. YOM is setup for "comercial advertising", while RDV is setup for member/subscription support. Only time will tell which setting works best. | ||||
| The songs are mainly "Top-40 hits" from the years 1965 - 1985. Those are the years, that had the most memories for myself. There some other songs mixed in, only because I like them. I do take suggestions, but not all make it. When you have your own station, you can play whatever you like also. Are there other stations out there doing this? Honestly, I don't know. I haven't found one yet, but the internet is a big place. There are stations that play songs from the 60's 70's & 80's, however, I've noticed that they play "mainstream" songs.. ie.. disco only, classic rock only, soft rock only.. I try not to seperate into those categories. As long as it's a minimum of a Top-40 hit between 1965 and 1985, I'll make it available for play. it is possible to hear Ted Nugent, followed by Helen Reddy. Keep this in mind, Not every Top-40 song was good (ie. Paul Anaka - You're Having My Baby), however, most (if not all) Top-40 songs do have a place in our memory. Which is why you'll hear those songs here. | ||||
| This site is very simple in structure and features. This is because I am not an expert web designer (give me time). Keeping it simple, keeps it fast, clean and more compatible with different types of web browsers (Including iPhones, Treo's and other "not so common" browsers). | ||||
| History | ||||
| The best way to understand why I'm doing this is to give a brief history of RDV/YOM. You could say that RDV/YOM began over 35 years ago (early 70's). As a kid, I'd go to our local JC Penney's, which was the only store in town (small town) that sold top-40 45rpm records. Thanks to the generosity of my mother, we would always pick up a couple of these records, with every visit. For whatever reason, with our family of 6 kids (A real life Brady Bunch), I became the "keeper" of these records. | ||||
| Fast-forward 15 years (mid 80's), to where I ran across the book, "Billboard Top 40 Hits". Just reading the book brought back memories and, more importantly, gave me the notion that I could find all the songs in the book. This was the time when CD's were still very new (I didn't own a CD player at this time) and there was no internet, mp3's or even Microsoft Windows. I purchased an old juke box, just so I could play the 45's from the collection I was slowly building. | ||||
| Move on another 10 years (mid 90's). With the coming of CD's, I was quickly replacing my 45rpm collection (special thanks to Time-Life and Rhino records). | ||||
| And move ahead to 5 years ago: The work I was doing at the time, consisted of alot of traveling and long stays throught different parts of the country. This made it difficult to listen to my songs on the road. I began the quest of how to listen to my CD's without having to carry them along. After trying several programs and methods of which weren't meeting my expectations, I began to look at internet radio. While looking, I ran across a very unique internet station, that was playing "my kind of music" and allowed me to make requests. The station was originally at http://klipradio.com (k-Living In The Past). I did not link to this URL because, due to my poor judgement in character and thousands of lost dollars later (yes, I'm a bit upset with what happened), http://www.klipradio.com is no longer an internet radio station. The remains of http://www.klipradio.com can be found here ( http://klipradio.net ), a URL I aquired with the anticipation of owning klipradio.com. After, not being able to procure klipradio.com, I had to come up with my wone station name. I couldn't decide on which I liked better, "Radio Deja Vu" or "Yesterday Once More". So I now use both. | ||||
| And here we are at the present. There are 2 sites which are maintained. and http://yomiradio.com (Yesterday Once More Internet Radio - YOM) and http://radiodejavu.com (Radio Deja Vu Internet Radio - RDV). YOM is setup as a free, no cost to the listeners, Top-40 format audio stream that will be supported by advertisements. RDV is being setup for top-100 format, low cost membership access. A small monthly fee will be charged in order to use the features of the RDV site. The features of both sites are describe below. | ||||
| Features | ||||
| YOM | Make requests from a very large playlist of "Top-40" songs from 1960-1985 | |||
| RDV | Make requests from a very large playlist of "Top-100" songs from 1960-1985 | |||
| RDV/YOM | Dedicate the request and also email the dedication (my attempt at the "long distance dedications"). | |||
| RDV/YOM | Tagboard. We are not alone. | |||
| RDV | Move the request to "the front of the line" | |||
| RDV | <future> scheduled 30 minutes a week for your requests only. | |||
| RDV | <future> Using your phone or computer microphone, be able to talk betwen your songs while using your computer to stop/start songs. All this in "real time", in the true D.J. fasion.. | |||
| Who is Otto? | ||||
| Otto is the "Auto play" feature. When no requests are made, the show must go on. Otto is programmed to randomly play known Top-40 songs from the playlist. (Otto doesn't know them all yet). | ||||
| Sytem Specs, Services and Special Thanks: | RDV and YOM are applicaitons, running on a Windows XP PC. The PC sits in my home office. Listeners never actually connect directly to this system. Instead they connect to the web site host for the web page and to an "audio streaming provider" to listen to the tunes. | |||
| Radio station software | Spacial Audio SAM. http://spacialaudio.com. Provides the Song queuing, encoding and scheduling. | |||
| Audio streaming | The Pure Mix (http://www.thepuremix.com). Takes my one stream output and sends it out to upto 350 listeners. This is where your mp3/wma player is connected to, when listening to the tunes. | |||
| Network | Time Warner Cable's home business class service. 2mbps upload/16mbps download business class. My choices were very limited here. | |||
| Host: | Blue Host. http://www.bluehost.com. Best hosting service around. They really take good care of their customers. Ask for Teresa. | |||
| Hardware/OS | Custom Built - AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ 2.2ghz 2gb RAM. Windows XP. (Way too much power for what we're doing. This all could have been done on a single laptop). | |||
| Resources: | Top 40 Database (top40db): http://www.top40db.net. Tools for automated mp3 artist, title & release date verification. Also, site advertises as being "The most accurate lyrics site on the net". I found this to be true. Not only are the lyrics accurate, the ability to search these lyrics (in case you don't know the name of the song) has been invaluable for allowing me to appear smarter than I really am. | |||
| Tagboard | Originally Blab! 3.x, from http://hot-things.net. Source code purchased and highly modified by listener Dawg. (Didn't need all the features and they were tough to turn off). | |||