What is the definition of community radio?
A community radio is a small not for profit for the members of the public or a certain community, in order for social gain. A community radio is often run by members of community such as volunteers that are on no pay, as they are not allowed to earn a profit of a small not for profit radio station. 
How does it differ from a commercial radio?
A commercial radio uses advertisements to earn a profit, as it delivers audiences to advertisers who pay to advertise on their station, this allows the radio station to earn a profit, depending on the amount of money they pay depends on how regular there advertisement is on the station and how far up they are on the cart wall, which is if it is first in the cue up it will be more likely to be played again compared to some others that are further down as they payed a smaller amount.
A commercial radio station is different to a community radio station because a community radio station is broadcasts to small amount of people or the community where as a commercial radio station is on a larger scale and delvers and audiences to their advertisers. Commercial radio stations do generally play pop, chart and mainstream music on their stations as this will reach a broader range of the audience as well as will have a larger play server, so for stations like Hallam FM and Capital FM their play server will have thousands of songs from the mainstream set of music as they are providing for the mass of the audience compared to small not for profit community play server where it will only have a small play server. Depending on the Station, will depend on the songs they have on the play server to, as this is where all the music they have used is now stored and kept for easy access.
A community radio station generally does things to do with the community for example Sheffield Live would not do a show about London, as their audience reach is in Sheffield therefore you would expect them to tell you about events around Sheffield or things that have happened around Sheffield to keep the viewers interested. So community radio's could have things like 'indie hour' to reach that set particular group of the audience.
All radio production was dominated by analogue technologies, vinyl's, and track tapes, which was highly time consuming as you would physically have to swap the tapes all the time as they could only hold 8 tracks on them, it would also be more expensive as you would have to buy all the tapes and things ready.
To be a radio DJ back in the times of analogue it was seen as a great skill as you would have to operate all of them at the same time, and all the responsibility of the show running smoothly would be down to you. Tony Blackburn was a great example of this. To create an ident, trailer or advert you would have to do something called 'spliced' which was recording everything separately and unravelling all the tapes cutting the tapes in the places you needed to and sticking the buts in where you needed them to be physically, this was seen as a really hard skill to have but very good one if you did, so things like sound, music and commentary would all have to be recorded separately and stuck together physically.
1980's was when radio turned to compact CD this then started to replace all the analogue of the radio, which gave radio much better sound quality than the tapes did. In the 1990's was when we had things like mini disks and digital audio tapes, which made radio easier to produce as everything was in place.
Controlling the output would need the use of a digital mixing desk which controls the live mix of the programme, this includes things like the jingles, guests, sound fx, adverts, conversations, songs and volumes. The volumes are said to have to be around 6-7 so that the sound does not come across distorted or bad quality.
High quality digital music formats such as wav and flac are what are used for digital broadcasts.
Adobe audition , Soundbooth, Protools and Qubase, (non linear editing packages) are now used to edit and record programmes, packages, idents, adverts and stings, etc.
Ident is the branding of a channel or station where as a jingle is for a specific radio show.
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