Hey y'all,

Yes, we have a phone line again! The number's 08451546812 (catchy, huh?) and we might get another one if I find more excuse to procrastinate from my exams. Currently you can only phone into it, but there's a chance we might be able to get some funding for call-outs if enough people want to (and once we've drawn up a set of rules that precludes prank calls to the Royal Family...)

If you're one of the cool kinds of people to know how to use it already, it's mapped to the second telco module (last channel on Alice).

However, I appreciate most of you won't, so just hold up for a month or so. This is long notice, I know, but once my exams are finished (mid-June) I'm planning to run a trial "Advanced Alice" training workshop for anyone who's interested (maybe spread over a couple of afternoons, maybe just one). Things I'd like to cover include:

- recording a show onto Minidisc

- using the interview room mics/headphones and monitoring through there

- talkback between different studios

- monitoring your levels correctly and efficiently etc

- how to use the phone lines

- how to delay your entire show (like have the whole show 10-20 seconds behind live) and be able to 'dump' to live if someone breaks broadcasting rules. Almost essential if you're going to have phone-ins where people aren't necessarily going to play by the rules and might swear/say something offensive/racist/blah.
- creating separate recording or aux mixes

- and, probably separately, how to use Rivendell (the touch-screen interface) and set up all your playlists on there to fade-in/out automatically, set up your own jingles etc :)

I'd quite like this to be standard fare next year for everyone wanting to run a show (partly so people know how the desk works if something's wrong). Would anyone be interested in coming along to this in the last week of term or thereabouts, so I can see how the format works etc? Or indeed, if anyone knows Alice well (oo-err) then would anyone be interested in helping out?

Lastly, sorry again about all the current hoo-hah with servers. We're working on getting new servers, but we anticipate that'll take about a month and a half (when my exams finish, in June) because we need to write documents to apply for funding and spend at least a weekend configuring everything, which none of us have at the moment. Meanwhile, we might try and get automatic show recording happening sooner, but please just hang on in there (and please don't bring drinks into the studio - it's really easy to leave them outside in the entrance and have a sip between songs - we can't afford to replace anything else!)

Max