I let software run my station for 8 weeks, unattended. What I learned.

Hi, my name is Yaniv Morozovsky, and I have worked in the radio industry for more than three decades. Most of that on SAM Broadcaster and, lately, AzuraCast. On 13 July I did something I had wanted to try for a long time: I handed one of my internet stations to automation completely, with nobody in the studio, and did not touch it. It is still on air today: https://ystream.live Some honest notes for anyone who runs a station and has wondered about the same. Segues are the whole game. The thing that makes automation sound like a jukebox is the fade timer. Every song fading at the same point, every cold ending faded when it should stop dead. What fixed it was analysing every song once (intro end, vocal entry, outro, the real ending) and crossing on those points per song. Once that was in, listeners stopped noticing there was no one there. Making an automated station sound like a DJ is mostly making the crossfades right, and that was our biggest achievement from day one. The voice matters less than where it lands. I cloned my own voice for the breaks, and honestly the voice itself is not what people comment on. What they hear is whether the talk-up ends before the vocal. When it lands, it sounds like radio. I let the AI DJ open every hour, read the weather, and in the last week also read a short news segment when the hour begins. Scheduling by rules beats scheduling by clocks, most of the time. Key, tempo, energy, era, genre, artist separation, and a few written rules like "start every hour with an international song". The hour writes itself and I stopped building clocks. What I gave up was the twenty years of Clockwheel habits, and there were days I missed them. Some of the most annoying bugs of automation software, like repeating the same song over and over, or playing the same artist twice in the same hour, are all gone. The boring parts decide whether you can actually broadcast. Royalty reports, listener stats per song, loudness that holds across a 1975 master and