And, it is quite possible that this would only be appreciated by fellow broadcast engineers, but its appeal definitley goes beyond that.  Even the casual on-looker has been impressed.

It all started back in the year 2000.  I was working for an independent FM station that had just been purchased by a group owner.  Part of the changes were moving the whole thing into new studios, and pretty much replacing ALL the equipment.  Well, that left a perfectly functional SMARTCASTER system headed for the dumpster.  This was a system that in its day supported an AM, an FM, and a production studio.  It had been upgraded so it safely made it past Y2K just fine.

 So, by asking the right people, I was able to intercept the dumpster, and aquired it as the music-storage system for my home sound system.  Without it being on-the-air, I was acually able to learn that it had a lot more functions than we ever used when it was running at the station.  Also, it was somewhat limited on storage space.  Now, keep in mind this is a 486 based system, running DOS 6.22.  That means the largest drive it can "see" is 8 gigs, and the largest partition it can use is 2 gigs.   With a little help from E-bay I exapanded it from drives D thru M to having drives D thru V.  I still have room to add W, X, Y and Z if I ever do run out of space.  ("A" drive is the floppy in each system, and "C" drive is the operating drive in each system -- there are 3 computers in the system.  "D" thru "V" are the network audio drives).  So, it now has nineteen 2-gb audio partitions, which, by today's standards, is still not huge.  But, with APT-X audio cards that use approximately a 4:1 compression, that's a lot of audio.  And, I can mix stereo and mono and select the appropriate sample rate depending on the source.  Much of the material I was putting into it came from reel-to-reel mono, so there was no point in having it set at anything higher than 11khz mono.

Based on that, I currently have over 5,000 audio cuts, ranging from under a minute to many an hour or longer, and it is less than half full.

The real beauty of the the system is the playback.  No longer do I have to hunt down a tape, or a record (remember records?) to listen to what I want to hear.  I just ask for it on the system, and there it is!  I have a running program that plays thru my oldies library until I interupt it for something I want at a paricular time.  And there are logs saved for seasonal stuff like Halloween and Christmas.  When someone is visiting and mentions a particular song they remember and want to hear, I can have it on the stereo in the living room in seconds.

I'm still adding stuff and building logs, but it sure beats any other storage system for being able to play what you want, when you want it, and keep a good background running the rest of the time.

And, while I doubt if anyone still has a vintage system like this on the air, if, by chance, you do, and have issues, I just might know how to help you!