𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚁𝙰𝙳𝙸𝙾 𝚃𝙷𝙰𝚃 𝙲𝙰𝙽 𝚁𝚄𝙽 𝚄𝙽𝚃𝙸𝙻 𝚈𝙴𝙰𝚁 𝟿𝟿𝟿𝟿 — 𝚆𝙸𝚃𝙷𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙱𝙸𝙻𝙻𝙸𝙾𝙽𝚂 𝙾𝙵 𝚁𝙾𝚆𝚂

DIY RADIO TECH / FUTURE LOG

ᴵⁿ ᵗᶦᵐᵉˢ ᵒᶠ ᶜˡᶦᵐᵃᵗᵉ ᵉᵐᵉʳᵍᵉⁿᶜʸ CLIMATE CLOCK

The Radio That Runs to Year 9999

Rave the World Radio has a new kind of clock. Not a countdown. A schedule that already knows the next song — including the one that starts on the last second MySQL will admit exists.

⚠ DATABASE LIMIT: 31 DECEMBER 9999 — 23:59:59 UTC

31 December 9999, 23:59:59 UTC. That is the ceiling of a MySQL DATETIME. It is also now a real play time on ravetheworldradio.com .

The Problem That Looked Like a Billion Rows

The station does not shuffle in the listener’s browser and hope for the best. Each channel — Main, Electro, Chill-out, Goa-Trance, Hardcore, Afrobeats — has a play log: track name, genre, and played_utc.

The player asks only: what started in the last ten minutes, and what is queued next?

5–6 BILLION
ROWS?

If you materialise every play from now until that DATETIME wall, you are staring at roughly five to six billion rows across six streams.

That is not a clever database. That is a warehouse.

The Lossless Trick

Listen to Electro for half an hour and the secret is obvious. Nine tracks. Same order. Then the first one again. The loop is 1,747 seconds — a little under 29 minutes.

1. Arpent
2. Bit Bit Loop
3. Blippy Trance
4. Fresh Focus
5. Ice and Snow
6. Jungle Mission
7. Kosmose Vaikus
8. Mere Hingamine
9. Rahulik Suda

Epoch (UTC): 27 February 2026, 07:41:56.

played_utc = start + n × cycle_length + offset

That formula is the billion-row table. Storing the nine names and their lengths is the raw data. Expanding it into billions of inserts would only repeat the same block until the calendar runs out.

A Date You Can Audit

Pick a ridiculous afternoon: 15 June 2099, 12:00:00 UTC.

The song is Arpent. It started at 11:57:43 and ends at 12:00:25.

Loop number: 1,324,001

On the last legal DATETIME, 9999-12-31 23:59:59 UTC, Electro is in Kosmose Vaikus, started at 23:54:58.

No UNIX_TIMESTAMP() on these dates. After 19 January 2038 that function returns zero. The schedule uses DATETIME arithmetic so year 9999 does not fall off a 32-bit cliff.

What the Listener Actually Loads

The public page still looks like a radio. It synthesises a short window: ten minutes back, twelve hours ahead.

A handful of rows. The six cycles on disk are about 132 tracks, not 132 million.

The MP3s did not move. The URLs did not change. Only the idea of “the log” got honest.

Why Prolong It?

A 24/7 station is a promise that someone, somewhere, can press play and hear a decided next track. Most streams fake that with a live encoder. This one can point at a calendar instead.

I like that the proof fits in a spreadsheet: two loops, then a handful of spot dates. I like that a home playlist export (M3U + the raw filenames) is the same contract the server uses.

THE CLIMATE CLOCK IS STILL RUNNING.
SO IS THE RADIO.
ONE OF THEM WE CAN ACTUALLY SCHEDULE.

REFERENCES / RECEIPTS

Sources & Technical References

• MySQL — Date and Time Data Types — DATETIME range and storage behaviour.
• MySQL — Date and Time Functions — Date arithmetic and temporal functions.
• Rave the World Radio — Public radio channels and scheduling system.
• Climate Clock — Climate-emergency reference used in the article.

Technical calculations and playlist-cycle examples are based on the station's scheduling data and implementation.

▶ TUNE IN

ravetheworldradio.com
ELECTRO CHANNEL →

Luka Jagor