The Long Story Of A Beige Computer

 Just because it's gotten increasingly confusing over the past week or so, here's a detailed blog post about the current situation WGMU is in, and why it's probably next to impossible to listen to us.
 
Here's a basic description of our broadcast system, from your side to ours. Typically, you connect to a multicast server which takes the audio data and sends it to the listeners. It receives the audio data from a computer in the Johnson Center studio; a battered Gateway machine dating from 2001, running Windows 98 SE, which is encoding all the audio it receives from our soundboard. You might thing this is a horrible idea, but actually this computer has been doing a pretty fine job over the past eight years. In fact, I personally never advocated replacing it until it actually started messing up.
 
For a while, we thought it WAS messing up; earlier this semester, it was receiving audio and inexplicably amplifying it to the point where the audio meters on the soundboard were useless because we couldn't get loud enough to see the needles move. There was some speculation that it was a hardware problem, but as it turns out, it was simply the result of something being changed. Many computers have two audio-in jacks; "microphone" and "line in". This is actually an important distinction. "Microphone" actually amplifies the signal, which is something you have to do with a microphone; it's not going to power itself, usually. "Line in" doesn't. Somehow the cable got switched, and plugged into the mic port. With the pre-amplifier. Thankfully we caught that. Unfortunately, the next disaster wasn't so easily fixable.
 
This all happened sometime last week. It had been having trouble before; it takes a very long time just for it to open folders and render icons, let alone actually do important things. Then the Windows Media encoder started crashing; I suspect it simply couldn't access the hard drive fast enough anymore, and didn't have enough of a buffer for the encoding to work. 
 
So we get a new computer. A Dell machine not unlike what we see scattered across the whole campus, running something more recent than Windows 98 SE (but not Vista, dear god). Of course we ran into a brick wall the second we realized nobody had given us the root password, so for the time being (hopefully just another day), the ancient Gateway is still roaring away, it's probably crashed by now, and our internet stream is hardly working. 
 
Hang on, someday this will all work out.