If you go back through the history of J1’s predecessor Hardcore J, the station started in 2001.  At that time, “HCJ” was running using the Live365 basic broadcasting solution.   At that time, all of the music was encoded at 56K.  Because of the limitations of the basic mode, we placed ID jingles actually at the beginning of the song files, just to make for better transitions.

The practice of inserting the jingles lasted until September, 2006.  After then, all new tracks would not have any introductory jingles.  This was also the time when HCJ went live and went to a 64K stream.

In 2009, prior to the image change to J1, we went through and restored hundreds of music tracks to improve their quality and to remove the ID jingles.

Even with that change, there’s still thousands of music tracks in the J1 library with the “Hardcore” imaging.  These tracks are used solely on the weekends (although one or two have been known to sneak into the weekday format).

A new effort at J1 is on the way to take approximately 1,000 more tracks and restore them.  The tracks were personally chosen by J1’s director Michi to be songs that can be used for a subformat within J1 called “Michiasa Music”.

We believe the entire restoration effort will take approximately a month.   These songs will be played on a new show “Michiasa Music” that will be airing Monday-Friday from 8AM-10AM JST (7AM-9AM ACT, Sun-Thur 3PM-5PM PST).

The restored music will also be played on the J1 Hardcore J Retro Weekends.

Stay tuned.  More great things coming to J1!

J1 LOVES YOU!