I listened to part of today's show (March 23, 1974). I noticed they
played #32(Main Ingredient), followed it with #33(Staple Singers),
then proceeded to #31(Anne Murray).
It seemed very unusual to be out of sequence, but it was done smoothly.
Hey, Jmack19...
Although rare, Sirius/XM has, in the past, scrambled up the countdown (hard to believe, but true)!!!
When I had a subscription - which I cancelled, once AT-40 was turned into chop suey between 2009 & 2011 (are they still doing that?) - I recorded AT-40 at work to listen to, once I got home.
Number 40 started in the right spot, but every song after that was completely out of order.
Having friends at Sirius, I was able to get an up-close tour of their playback systems & studios in NYC. At that time, they used Klotz boards, Orban 8200 digital processing & Clear Channel's own
Prophet playback systems.
In order to make the Radio Display System (RDS) work, each song had to be individually set in their own slot (cue to play). In the case of AT-40, the songs had to broken down, individually, then
loaded into Prophet, manually, as the shows changed each week. If you listen to Sirius/XM, you can actually hear the spacing between each song, just as the RDS changes to tell you what it is.
If the person, manually loading the machine, isn't paying attention (or each song is labeled wrong), you'd swear you were going mad! How could these songs possibly play back out of order?
The night I heard this (in 2009), I was working at CBS Radio. We have a sports distribution relationship with Sirius/XM, so I called their master control & told them that the show is all messed up.
The MC engineer thought I was on drugs until I asked him to take a listen. He had to pull the show off the air! Unfortunately, it couldn't be replaced, as it was the Wednesday re-broadcast.
I haven't re-subscribed to Sirius/XM, so I don't know if they've changed the way they present AT-40. In 2007, they not only let the entire show (with complete hourly & show close endings) play,
but they also aired every AT-40 Extra, as well as Casey-voiced show promos! You, literally, got everything that came on the original records. After 2008, promos & hourly end themes were edited
down to a fade-out. Later, AT-40 Extras, hourly opens & all interstitial bits (ie: Book of Records, LDD's & What Ever Happened To...?) were gone. All we had left was a bare-bones countdown that
made no sense, since the slot was three hours, and the show was edited down to something barely over two hours! Without spots, the entire show - if you ran out the end theme music - is only
2:35:00 for a three-hour show, and 3:25:00 for a four-hour show (the 80's Channel listed AT-40 as a 4-hour show). The 80's AT-40's suffered the same fate until Sirius/XM dropped it in 2009.
BTW: That "out-of-order" show I got in 2009 was easy to re-construct into countdown order. Since there's that little audio gap (generated as one song slot in Prophet moves to the next), I just
isolated each song at the gap, followed the numbers (and the cue sheet) & put it back in proper order - sans gap.
I hope this helps to explain the problem. I'm surprised that it's still happening. I believe Sirius/XM has had a complete systems update since you cited the problem. Still, any system is only as good
as the person who's operating (programming) it!
