Re: RKO...automated?

["Aaron [Bishop] Read" <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 08:20 PM 8/17/2002, Donna Halper wrote:

>>>it was written--
>>>I just listened to Kim Komando's show this week..and it was the worst
>>>engineered show I have ever heard.
>
>So riddle me this, you engineers on the list.  I was in Vermont and NH 
>doing research last week, and I heard some incredibly bad radio from a 
>technical standpoint-- spots playing over each other, elements not 
>starting when they were supposed to, dead air... I thought a lot of 
>stations these days are on hard drive and/or satellite (as opposed to the 
>cheap-o automation some stations used to have), so why would these 
>mistakes still be occurring?

Computers are just as vulnerable to GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) as any 
technical system, often more so.  If the time is not put in in advance to 
properly prep your audio cuts and automation then it will sound awful.

All of my college station clients cringe and hiss when I mention the word 
"automation" and I always have to explain to them that automation by itself 
is not a bad thing.  Technology is NEVER a bad thing...it's policy 
regarding the technology that can be "bad".    If a station gets an 
automation that meets their needs (which is not the same thing as meeting 
their budget a lot of times) and puts the time into it, it can sound just 
as good - often better - than "the real thing".   The reason automation has 
gotten such a bad rap is cheap - usually commercial - stations trying to 
squeeze blood from a stone and not putting in the time and training to do 
it right.

I found it very amusing at WBRS last year when the staff voted to approve 
the purchase of an AudioVault-or-similiar-level automation system that one 
of the detractors insisted that we should be live all the time, "just like 
that great NPR station: WBUR!"  He was shocked when I explained that nearly 
75% of WBUR's programming is time-delayed by at least a hour, often by a 
day or two.  He also didn't get the concept that a hefty portion of WBUR's 
programming is coming off the satellite; he thought it was *all* done in 
their studios.  Welcome to the real world of radio, kid.  :-)

 From an even more personal perspective, Allston-Brighton Free Radio runs a 
LOT of automation, pretty much 12mid to 3pm every day.  We have a lot of 
foul-ups with the system because we have a pretty ambitious setup for a 
system that cost nothing; we run a lot of webcasts "live".  Meaning that 
the system is set to connect to a webcast server of some sort at a certain 
time and it just plays it from the remote server; not a 
download-and-replay-from-local-HD setup that is more common (but virtually 
impossible to completely automate the collection and playback).   Webcasts 
are inherently unreliable and we get a fair number of dropouts...and 
there's dead air for 10-60 seconds while the player buffers when it first 
connects.   All in all, though, I've got it rigged up not-to-badly...and it 
does sound a lot better than just MoHD for 15 hours every day.

____________________________________________
Aaron "Bishop" Read     aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels.com Technical Consulting
www.friedbagels.com   AOL-IM: ReadAaron