Airchecking
Fresh out of college and breaking into radio, I paid the bills writing code for an educational software company. That experience turned out to be key to a lot of what I did once radio became the day job. And when I eventually went back to being a developer — designing and writing SpinTrack — it all came full circle.
Career DJs know the work of making airchecks. It was good to do a lot of it, because it let you hear your own work the way a PD would when they first evaluated you. We spent a lot of time with tape and razor blades. Building SpinTrack, I remembered that, and built in auto-airchecking: every track, plus the live breaks in LIVE mode, is captured exactly as it aired — so it’s easy to review, even before an individual break goes out. The AIRCHECK CREATOR workflow lets you drag and drop them into any order, and one button saves the whole thing as an mp3 or .wav. What used to take tape and a razor blade is now drag, drop, and click.
Bug-stomping in the system a couple of weeks ago, it hit me again what’s possible when you let the other skills you’ve developed feed into what you’re doing now. Learning C++, JavaScript, and the rest never seemed like it would matter to a radio career — and I never imagined all those hours with cassettes and editing tape would matter the day I went back to writing code. It all works together.
Think about the parts of your life and career that feel unconnected. I’d bet there are more threads there than you’d expect — and probably a few new opportunities hiding in them.
Below is a look at the AIRCHECK CREATOR in action.
