wilkes

I'm a bit of a geek, I love technology, especially as it relates to radio, audio, (and computers).



At 'KBC FM, when you recorded a spot onto a cart, there was a box with rotary switches that you rotated to put tones onto an inaudible track on the tape. The computer would know that, for instance, 16054 corresponded to Budweiser. When a Budweiser spot played, that sequence was read into the computer, and it printed that a Budweiser ad had played, the time it played, and the length of the spot.



A program log, generated by the computer, in realtime. IN THE 1970s!

OMG .. Radio you are not older ... lol .. but I didn\'t spend long in radio nor did I get into it at a young age either ...  was never my intention but I stayed until I found a better job ... I love reading about all the technology that you used.  


We didn\'t play CDs on the air either ... lol.  It was the mid 80s and they were just becoming popular.  My job was mostly in the sales and promotions end and I wrote most of the ad copy  ... which was fun but chaotic.  KSPZ Oldies 92.9 Colorado Spgs ... we had an AM too but, for the life of me,  I can\'t remember the name of it now ... lmao.  Oh well ...  

Well I guess i"m older than you. I was in radio almost a decade before I saw a CD player, and almost two before I recorded anything digitally. When I started, it was Ampex 600 series reel to reels (Revox A-77s, then B-77s if your station was really hot), cart machines, 45s, and LPs.

In the '70s most radio stations still had a closet full of 78s gathering dust somewhere, as well as a 16" transcription turntable or two, and cart machines.

The most technologically advanced radio station in this area in the 1970s was WKBC-FM, which had an automation system that could play truly random-access. Any source could follow any other source. Mind-blowing for stations who had been using carousel-type automation. Of course it was very complicated...each and every "cart" player had it's own head, electronics, and pinch-roller. There were two racks of 48 carts. At that time the top 48 were used for commercials, PSAs, jingles etc., and the bottom 48 were used for current hit music. Oldies played from reel-to-reel decks.

The entire thing was sequenced by a computer, with completely random access...each event throughout the day was programmed into it. And what happened if you didn't program in enough events to fill an hour? No sweat...it went into a sub-routine, playing back to back music till the top of the hour.

It's the first place I ever worked where I could not tell whether the show on the air was live or automated. Everyone was quite proud of it!

Of course completely random access is nothing new these days...everyone has it, and every radio station uses automation to some extent...even when people are on the air live. Once he's read the weather, the jock can push a single button, and the computer will play all the commercials in his stop-set, play a jingle, and go into a song...while he gets coffee, or goes to the "throne-room".

It's a different world...but one that would be completely recognizable to anyone who worked at 'KBC "back in the day!"

Very interesting, Radio, regarding the radio production stuff. Blows my mind. My radio days were during the times of the \'cart\' and analogue board. No ProTools or digital rigs ... CDs were just catching on.

I used to love to watch my room-mates wince with distaste when they HAD to use a PC for some gig or another. Evidently some of the software for big line arrays and lighing integration as used in live concert sound and business theater was/is PC centric ... they used to whine like crazy. I just laughed. I have been through my MAC phase too and I hope never to have to go back there. No longer a MAC snob am I, nor will I be.

bigboystoys lots of music recording work is done on a Mac (probably more than PC, but it's not as big a split as it once was). However, radio production is very Windows-centric. Although there are some Pro Tools rigs out there (though still more on Windows than Mac), by far the most common rig for voiceover and production work is a PC, running Adobe Audition (what Cool Edit Pro has been called since being swallowed-up by Adobe a couple of years back).

From the radio spots in the network news, to the bits on the newscast themselvs, to the voiceovers between shows on TV at night, voiceover work is very much a "Windows world".

And any system that still does what you need done is not obsolete! I still love my first generation Asus EEEPC 701G, and it's positively flea-powered! (I keep swapping operating systems. I'm now back to XP on it, after many flavors of Linux).

Ahhh .. technology .... Ain't it fun?.. I have a Media Center box too that I never use even though it has some cool features .. tuner card and LightScripe drives. I mean to fire it up one day again, especially if I do land another HBA gig. Then I will use it just for work and nothing else. Most of the work-at-home gigs I get don't even support a 64bit OS yet and are still stuck at IE 7 ... so go figure

I'll have to check out my Nero again too ...was useful for burning and ripping ... maybe the latest editions have gotten better ...

Sounds like you've got a couple of boxes with lotsa' juice too ... I'm WAY behind you there ...wondering how long I'll have before upgrade is absolutely necessary.

Most, if not all, of the sound engineer-type geeks I know (and I know a bunch of um) are on MAC. What has kept you on a PC, I wonder.

Bigboys, my videocard wasn't state of the art...ever. It's the ATI HD2400 pro. I'm not a gamer, so 3D capabilities don't interest me a bit. It has dual monitor output...including a DVI which, through an HDMI adapter, feeds one of the HDMI inputs on my TV.

The tuner card actually cause no problem. When I capture to native MPEG-2 using Nero, or using the capture program in Windows Vista Media Center (yes I know...Vista...that's what they were loading them with when I bought mine. But after the second service pack, and the latest video drivers from ATI, it's finally actually stable!) What gets my system in trouble is trying to simultaneously capture 1080i video, while converting it to 480p mp4. It can't quite manage that. Actually it works in spurts...about 15 seconds on, five seconds off...which means I'm in the ballpark for power. Could be a memory issue...2GB is nothing these days.

But my desktop is primarily a work computer. It's the system I produce radio commercials, and my syndicated radio program on. It has more than enough horsepower to run tons of tracks simultaneously in Adobe Audition, including the virtual-faders in multitrack view (for automated mixing).

But my newer Gateway laptop (purchased last summer) with 64 bit Win 7, and 4GB of ram can slap it (my desktop) silly.

I often stay a generation behind in technology, so as not to break the bank...so that quad core processor would do me just fine!

should have added that I use XP Home ..

I guess I\'m the dinosaur here ... I built my box about 6 yrs ago using a DFI motherboard, P-IV 2.6ghz hyperthread processor and 4 gigs of dual channel DDR400 ram. Although I seldom run a game or any highly graphics-intensive applications for that matter, my machine does run, for my purposes, quite well.

I did purchase a Nero Suite early on but after having continual compatibility problems with other software that I used at the time, I have dumped it for good... probably .. haven\'t even thought about using it for a couple of years now. Back then I found it to be ***bersome and slow when I did use it .... and Nero\'s solutions to all problems was \'down this clean-up tool or that one\' run it and re-install Nero. Got old.

Tuner cards have always caused me problems too, Radio. Wonder how your video card capabilities stack up, ram and processor-wise? Is that video capability built onto the motherboard?

As of yesterday, even that quadcore is old.. :)

Well Win 7 IS snappier than Vista. I've upgraded my laptop to Win 7 (It's newer, and more powerful than my desktop).

As fast as substantial improvements in power come, and as inexpensive as new desktops are these days, I think three years is a good useful life. To each his own.

I use a different OS

Good Luck on upgrading the OS and making the computer faster, as the OS get "bigger and Better"

they also load more into the background, and require more to operate

I still have a computer that we sold in 1983 that originally came with 2ea 360k floppy disks DOS (no number, like 3, 4, 6.2 etc) and 64k ram, and a green monitor

it later was upgrade to a 20 meg hard and DOS 4 I turn it on about once every 2-3 months, when I start to feel like the computers I'm working on are getting slow

Speed is Relative

IMHO, 3 years is a very short lifespan for a computer. I can't imagine getting less than 5 and preferrably 7. I've got one computer that's at least 10+. A bit slow but still good for internet, email type things. My laptop's going on 6 and runs just as good as the day I bought it. My wifes is almost 3 and expect to see at a minimun another 3 out of that one. Maybe upgrading the OS will speed it up. Everytime I think the laptop gets slow they come out with a new OS and it ends up running faster than before. Good Luck, maybe it will hold out a bit longer.

There are newer, fancier computers than my desktop, but it's no slouch...dual-core processor, 2GB of ram (which was a lot when I purchased it in Dec of '07), a built-in ATSC TV tuner, and lots of goodies.

It can even capture hgih def TV in realtime, which I thought was totally cool at the time. But every piece of technology begins that inevitable march toward obsolescence the moment it leaves the assembly-line. At some point, you will discover things you'd like to be able to do, but just can't manage.

Which happened to me this weekend. I upgraded to Nero Media Suite 10, which allows you to capture High Def TV, and in real-time convert it to MP4 (rather than capturing it in "Native" MPEG-2, and converting later). Well in theory, that's what should happen. My system simply does not have the "grunt" to pull-off this little trick.

Don't you hate it when you start to find things your computer can't do? Hey, I can live without this capability. This system could even survive an upgrade to a Blu-Ray drive...plenty of "grunt" for playing 1080p video. But capturing 1080i, while converting it to 740 x 480 mp4 on the fly? Nope. "Homey don't play that".

I still think I'll live with it for another year. I like to get at least three years out of a desktop system, and we're not even to 2 1/2.

But a new Corei7 processor, or an AMD Phenom Quad Core, 64 bit Windows 7, and at least 6GB of ram, would be very nice!