TuneTracker System 7 is completely free for libraries up to 250 audio files. No trial period. No credit card. No catch. Here's the thinking behind that — and what it means if you want to get on the air but don't have a budget to work with.
Broadcasting has always been an expensive proposition. Transmitter, tower, FCC license, studio equipment, music licensing, staff — the list of costs doesn't stop. For community stations, school broadcasters, and people who just have something to say to a local audience, the barrier to entry can feel impossibly high.
We can't do anything about most of those costs. But we can do something about the software.
When we say TuneTracker System 7 is free, we mean genuinely free. You download it, install it, and use it. There is no 30-day trial. There is no watermark. There is no reduced feature set. The software you're running is the same full-featured System 7 that paying customers use — operating without limits within the 250-file library cap.
Two hundred fifty files goes further than it sounds. That's enough for:
For a lot of stations, 250 files is a complete radio operation. For others, it's a starting point — and it's a starting point that costs nothing.
The honest answer is that we believe in what we've built, and we're confident enough in it to let you use it before we ask you for anything.
Radio automation software has a reputation for being opaque, expensive, and Windows-dependent. We've spent years building something that's the opposite of all three. When you sit down with System 7, we think you'll understand fairly quickly why we feel the way we do about it. The free tier is how we get you to that moment without asking you to take our word for it.
There's also something we believe that goes beyond the business case: broadcasting matters. Community radio matters. The local station that plays the high school football game and interviews the city council candidate and remembers what your town sounds like — that station has value that gets harder to put a dollar figure on the more you think about it.
If someone wants to build something like that and doesn't have money for software, we'd rather be the company that helped them get on the air than the company that asked them to pay up front. That's not charity — it's the kind of company we want to be.
Most stations that start on System 7 Free eventually outgrow it. The library fills up. The station adds formats, expands programming, starts building a deeper rotation. At that point, the path forward is simple: a System 7 license unlocks unlimited files and a handful of additional capabilities.
We designed it that way deliberately. We didn't want a version of the software that would feel crippled or frustrating to use — something you'd tolerate until you could afford the real thing. We wanted the free tier to be genuinely useful, genuinely functional, and genuinely pleasant to run a station on. If and when you outgrow it, upgrading should feel like a natural next step, not a relief.
Licensing is structured to be accessible too. It's not a per-seat model or a recurring subscription that escalates over time. It's a straightforward arrangement designed to work for the kind of stations that use TuneTracker — community radio, LPFM, small-market commercial, educational. Not the chains with IT departments and procurement budgets.
We hear from a lot of different people who run System 7 Free. A few that come to mind:
The LPFM station that just got its construction permit and is six months from going on air. They need to learn the software, build their clocks, set up their library, train volunteers — and none of that requires a production license. System 7 Free handles all of it while they get established.
The school radio station with a $0 software budget and a teacher who just wants students to learn broadcasting on real professional software rather than something designed for classrooms. System 7 Free is the same software working professionals use.
The internet radio station with a focused niche — a genre station, a local nostalgia station, a station built around a particular community — that doesn't need a library of thousands. They might stay on System 7 Free indefinitely, and that's genuinely fine with us.
The broadcaster who's been out of the industry and wants to get back in, or the podcaster who wants to see what it feels like to run a real station. Download it, install it, set it up. See what you think. No risk.
System 7 runs on any modern Mac with Apple Silicon — that includes every MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac sold since late 2020. If you have a current Mac, you have a radio station computer.
The download is right here on our website. It installs like any Mac app. Setup documentation walks you through the first configuration. And if you get stuck, we're reachable — that's part of what we do.
If you've been thinking about getting on the air but assumed you couldn't afford the software to do it right, you can stop thinking that.
Full-featured radio automation for Mac. Up to 250 audio files, no time limit, no credit card. Get on the air.
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