Lo2: Technology and Processes

Analog to digital: get images of the following with a web link:

1960's

Like most form of media, Radio has been dramatically altered by the transition to digital production methods. these analogue from are typically vinyls and tapes. DJ Stands for disk jockey, DJ's typically present the show as well as mix and introduce and play the music. traditionally all radio productions were dominated by analogue technologies, song were played using vinyl records or 8-track tapes. These songs had had to be manually cued up by the DJ this was very difficult and was considered an art from. this was all very expensive and time consuming, you needed a vinyl player and a tape player as well as allot of space to store the music and machines. Pre-recorded packages, idents, trailers, adverts etc. would have been recorded using analogue tapes and the spliced (edited) manually by cutting up the tape and splicing it back together in the right order. There was minimal room for error as you were physically altering the media.

1980's

Digital technologies started replacing analogue formats because of their superior sound quality (no artefacts that typically came from analogue methods such as vinyl's and tapes being replaced by CD's. this rise of digital methods meant that host the radio show was much easier and less time consuming, with the cd being more compact and stores more information meaning that less storage is needed.

1990's

this is when the rise of recordable digital formats, such as mini-disks and digital audio tapes which made digital radio production much easier and cheaper as the technology evolved.

2000's

In the turn of the 21's century, digital technology has revolutionised how radio production is done. this can be seen with the fact that whilst CD's are still sometimes used, most radio music is now stored on a computer in a server called a Play Server. this allowed for the queuing of songs to be done in seconds as well as allowing for a much bigger sound library's meaning that DJ's can now simply click on a song and play it. A Digital cart wall has you advert, you're and the radio station jungles and a pre-recorded piece of media pre-loaded on it so that everything is queued and ready to play. How the DJ interacts with the digital music is through a Digital Mixing Desk, this allows them to adjust the volumes of different parts of the broadcast allowing to fade in music and dialog as well as manually mix the music.

High Quality digital music formats such as WAV and FLAC are used for digital broadcasts, these are edited in Non-Linear editing packages such as Pro-tools, Audacity and Adobe Audition. this demonstrates technological convergence as instead of having to splice tape you can do it digitally now, allowing for mistakes as you can simply reverse what you have done.

all this innovation has allowed for more interact with the audience not just due to the fact that technology within the studio has gotten better, but also outside with things such as black box devices allowing for easy phone calls, messages, emails and SMS from anywhere as well as being able to interact via social media with sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Through this Blackbox device you can also watch the radio stations. a perfect example of this is the Kermode and Mayo's film review July 5th, 2013, where host saying two different times depending on how you're watching the show via either the live broadcast or the recorded segment for the radio show later. this also means that you can re-listen to radio stations as they are broadcasted and saved digitally as well as over the air.

This heavily contradicted to earlier on in radio production where audiences could only interact via phone in's from either their house or a phone booth or writing a post card/ letter.

Equipment as use cases:

Microphone - These are used for recording the DJ's voice as they host the radio station, allowing for more interaction and personality within the radio show.

headphones - These are used by the DJ's so that they can monitor the levels are all the sounds that are being played such as their voice and the music being played so that it stays balanced to the viewer.

workstation - This is used to mix the different sounds that are playing on the show, typically changing the volumes of 2 tracks to fade between the two as well as fade in and out the music and the DJ's voice.

speakers - Like headphones, these are typically used to monitor the levels are all the sounds that are being played such as their voice and the music being played so that it stays balanced to the viewer. unlike headphones though speakers are not typically used by the DJ while on air, this is due to the fact that the speakers can be picked up the hosts microphone meaning that it would cause allot of echo and feedback making the show unusable.

digital cart-wall - this is used to store all the sound bites that will be used by the radio station such as the stings and jingles, the cart-wall can also be used to easily queue a sound making production allot easier for the DJ

playlists - These are used to split the stations different types of music into sections instead of it all being in one giant list, making the musical allot easier to find and play.