With some help from my friend Jeremy who accepted a position as a MacGenius in Houston, we upgraded my Indigo iMac’s hard drive capacity from 20 GB to 80 GB (now there are iPods larger than this as a standard). Then I transferred over 2000 MP3 files I had saved to an external drive, deployed the playlist for the stream and fired it up with an audio cable plugged to the stereo. Thus the official KMAG began. It hasn’t really stopped since…except for the migrations to two other Macs, the numerous Texas thunderstorms which easily take out the Texas power grid (a mouse farting could put it offline) and once incident involving a cat stepping on the surge protector’s on/off switch.
KMAG carries on, fulfilling my private fantasy of having my own radio station and eventually I hope it will gain access to decent bandwidth for my friends to listen to it in spurts. Heck, it would’ve been nice to tap into while we were away on vacation; the NPR affiliate was rather hit-or-miss in Las Vegas. I know there’s Pandora and other options to compete with yet I can do a better job than a computer’s algorithm; programming content is an art, not a science (the science of marketing, aka getting the lowest common denominator through focus groups).
As of today, the stream is closing in on 1.1 million songs played, has surpassed the 2000 mark on new songs being introduced into it (those that are shuffled around in the Top 35, formerly 30) and contains over 8500 tunes in its playlist (also modified every week or so). Recently, I gave KMAG its own page on the site. I plan to expand this section somewhat but meanwhile, give it a glance to see what I’m listening to in the car or my iPod when I can’t tap the stream.
On to nine years, 1.5 million played songs and the stream containing over 10,000 tracks.