Doing a radio pilot

Last Saturday me and my media buddy Josh decided we wanted to try and get some experiences at radio.
He is more focusing on the presenting side, where as I was focusing more on the producing side.
We got in to the studio, turned everything on, and set everything up ready for recording a small pilot show. We had 3 hours studio time, so we decided we’d only make around a half an hour show but as we gained a bit more experience with planning, and had thought up more ideas for features that weren’t just purely music based, we planned to expand this.
At the minute, we had a track of the day, and old school track of the day but we want to come up with some more imaginative features that hadn’t really been done before a thousand times.
We quickly put together a playlist of 9 songs, and then I got together a collection of radio beds from my hard drive, and put beds and songs in two separate instances of winamp, allowing me to crossfade between the two. We are going to work on some jingles at some point.
I then opened sound forge to do some audio level testing, and here’s where the fun began. All of the audio from the desk was distorting. I tried to resolve it by turning down the desk, but that didn’t work, I then tried turning down the sound card on the unit itself and in windows, but no go. We decided to record anyway even though just so we had something to show for our studio time.
One thing we definitely need to work on is knowing the songs that we are playing, as a few times we had both forgotten how the song ends. Despite this lack of planning, and the sound issues, the show went without a hitch apart from once a dialog had popped up in winamp during a song and I hadn’t noticed so we had a little bit of dead air.
Next time we try to do a show, we will definitely plan some sort of running order/playlist and make sure we know the songs we’re working with.
We also need to plan and make some jingles and some material so it’s not just song, bed, song, bed, song.