Hello Radio Channels

A few days ago I found myself all the way at the Astro office in Technology Park Malaysia. Was there for some meetings but right after my meetings I was given a tour of the AMP studios.

AMP Radio Networks is the company that houses many of the radio stations we listened to like Hitz.fm, My.fm, Mix.fm, Lite Fm and a whole lot more. It’s owned by Ananda Krishnan, one of the richest men in Malaysia…. who owns just about everything else except maybe the chair I’m sitting on right now

Junior is the nice person who offered to give us all the tour. He’s the guy on the left.

For those of you who don’t already know, the girl inside the studio through the double glass windows is Jojo Stryus.

Also inside the double glass is the legendary cockroach that somehow managed to get itself caught into between the windows many many years ago.

This is how a cockroach that has been there for many many years looks like.

It’s been there so long it’s probably already best friends with the metal screw next to it.

Junior made me promise to tell the story that it’s not that they didn’t want to remove the cockroach but just that it proved to be extremely difficult since it was in between two big pieces of thick glass.

So they left it there… perhaps hoping that it might just turn into dust and disappear one day.

Here’s where your favourite radio shows come from.

This is Mix.fm

And that’s Jay on Air on the inside.

She was really nice. When she saw me trying to take a picture of her later on she started waving and giving me a big smile.

We moved on to the rest of the studios and I spotted a studio that had the words “My.FM” on it.

I jumped a little excitedly

“WOW!!! MY.FM” and darted closer to see who was inside.

Junior caught up with me and said

“DUDE!!! You just walked RIGHT PASS HITZ!!!! I guess I know where your loyalty lies”.

I went “Whoops“, put my head down and turned around to check out Hitz.fm’s studio. I had met Ean earlier that morning right after he just finished his Morning Crew stint.

This is what the Hitz.fm studio looks like.

Right in between the My.FM and Hitz.FM studios was this panel for the show’s producers to sit on and monitor.

There was a screen with a whole playlist on all the songs that were going to be played on air. So if we saw that Lady Gaga’s Poker Face was the next song in the queue, right after the current song finished Lady Gaga would start playing.

All really computerized you’d almost think it could run itself. That’s the future. Everything running itself and doing things for you. One day I’m sure they’re even going to invent a computer that would calculate exactly how much toilet paper you need to use to wipe your ass on each swipe.

The music you hear in the studio is actually 8 seconds earlier than what we hear on our radios elsewhere. They have the 8 second buffer just in case someone makes a mistake or says something that they shouldn’t say on air.

Right next to the My.FM studio is the Xfresh studio where Shaz was DJing.

Xfresh is a very unique station compared to the rest. It plays only Indy music and it’s not allowed to play any other form of music. It can’t for example play anything from overseas. If they do it, they’ll get some big fine and all the XFresh staff will have to go out in the car park and do 300 push ups under the hot sun (No I’m kidding about that second bit).

Serious serious offense.

Right after the Xfresh studio were these little booths that DJs could go into to do some pre-recording. You know recording stuff to be played later on the show.