I left radio in the 90's, when all station music was on CDs (mostly), carts (a few), and vinyl (rarely). A friend that works in radio invited me on a station tour recently, and showed me his station's music library, now made up mostly of MP3s at 128kb. This is a market-leading Rock station, and I was surprised that most of the library is 128kb MP3s. I can tell the difference between a 128kb MP3 and a 196kb MP3, which is why nearly all of my home digital library is at 196kb. I'm curious to know if there's a "standard" digital music format that radio stations use these days. Is a 128kb MP3 considered "good enough" music quality for FM music stations these days?
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Standard music file format?
- Thread starter SwapMeetLouie
- Start date
Who owns the station? There's no industry standard.
Most large stations use uncompressed audio in their automation. It's essentially a requirement if you use HD Radio or other technology that has its own lossy digital encoding layer, which includes mobile streaming. Using two different lossy encodings can result in poor audio quality on-air.
There's no cost impact these days from using uncompressed audio. Today, enough hard drive capacity to hold the equivalent of thousands of CDs today costs under $100.
Those MP3s probably got put in decades ago, before an uncompressed solution was really feasible due to the expense of hard drives, and this owner hasn't seen fit to buy a new, uncompressed, audio library.
10tb hard drives are a bit over $200, and you'd want your system to be on one of the failure resistant RAID arrays, meaning having, probably several drives. And a backup on a NAS or on a corporate server would be fairly usual, and that will likely be over $1500 for a good NAS frame and 4 to 6 drives, manybe with "failure backup drives".
$100 is not reasonable. Just look at the size of one uncompressed song, and then multiply by the size of the playlist plus songs stored for specials and the like.
MP2 (MPEG I Layer II) was the norm for radio, not MP3. MP2 is not as efficient but has a lower processor load and stands up better to re-encoding than MP3.
MP2 is also the codec used by digital broadcast TV and the European DAB system (now being phased out in favor of DAB+, using AAC).
For uncompressed files, is FLAC the norm nowadays or the older, larger WAV format?
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
For broadcast, it is still WAV, because there are few (if any; I personally know of none but there could be some) automation software packages that support FLAC.
Personal collections by those who want lossless have pretty much migrated to FLAC because of the size difference, but most radio stations have a smaller library than the collectors.
For example, the entire on-air library for The Eighties Channel™, including the Forgotten 45s and Flashback Weekend libraries (either of which are larger than the core library is) takes up less than 100GB as WAV files.
And for an example of file size differences, I happen to have "Promises In The Dark" by Pat Benatar in both formats. The WAV version is 48MB and the FLAC version is 33.8MB. That's about a 30% reduction, which is significant for an individual but negligible for radio (70GB for a library instead of 100GB?).
As I follwed this discussion, I wonderd how many "independent" or small group stations also store their audio (music, spots, production libraries, website graphics etc.) on some kind of remote service that is not dependent on hardware at the station.
I've even seen a few stations that have separate transmitter sites that have a backup of everything there, away from the studios. Or at the home of the CE or owner. That usually includes "bookeeping" files as well.
I've even seen a few stations that have separate transmitter sites that have a backup of everything there, away from the studios. Or at the home of the CE or owner. That usually includes "bookeeping" files as well.
Correct, due to hacking and ransomware that goes on, where a station's computer system gets hacked, shutting down the station.
Or, more frequently, failure of a key component or even a disgruntled staffer who deleted stuff before leaving the building.
I know of one small station where the owner / manager takes an incremental backup of everything home daily, and alternates hard drives each week. That drive is not connected to anything, so can't be hacked unless connected to an already compromised system.
The $100 price was just for the drives, not any other infrastructure. If you have PC automation already, you can just swap in a bigger drive.
Drives are so cheap now that you can very nearly buy redundant drives for $100. Kingston is selling 1 TB SSDs for $60 on NewEgg. A 1 TB disk will easily carry all the music a radio station (or indeed, a cluster) would ever need.
The OP specifically mentioned MP3 at the station he toured. I agree with you that MP2 was much more common in broadcast settings back in the day, but MP3 was not unheard of, especially for advertisements.
Tell me where to buy drives of any useful capacity that cost $100.
If your motherboard will take SSDs. And 1tb will not hold much data. I have an 8tb RAID card in my main system that had a total cost of just over $2000 (bought new two months ago with latest generation SSDs).
And for backup, you need an external device. That requires multiple devices in RAID in a separate case.
Remember, a station not only needs to save music but also commercials past and present, accounting, music logs, commercial logs and invoices, etc. Add in eMails with tons of attachments, common in stations, and you need considerably more storage.
In the case of a viral attack or a calamity at the station, you need more than just the songs.
Let's say that the average song is 40mb. Do the math on about 1000 songs or 400,000mb. Even if you use smaller drives, you have to have redundancy or a RAID assembly.
International record labels, program suppliers and the like used MP3 almost exclusively in the later 90's and 00's.
How about 6TB hard drive for $119?
I’d go for the 8tb, and buy a less expensive ÑAS or one of those under-$100 RAID boxes for reliability. I would not trust a business backup to a single drive.
I once went into a radio station where there was a presenter on air, and clearly showing on the studio computer was Spotify. To their credit, I couldn't tell when listening to the FM signal while driving in before I'd seen the studio setup, but it's still not great.
I believe you're located in the UK, correct? Is that even legal?
As long as they're paying ASCAP/BMI/etc., does it matter where the music they play is coming from? Years ago, I heard of some radio stations which got their music from Napster.
I haven't checked Spotify, but most everything I've checked specifically says in their EULA that their programming can't be rebroadcast. Can that be enforced? Likely not unless someone decides to add a watermark. But why broadcast an inferior-sounding product? As mentioned above, cascaded compression can introduce some weird artifacts. Plus, today's multiband processors tend to emphasize the weirdness, echo-y and clanky-swooshy sounds on the high frequencies.
I work at a local community station that's been on the air for 45 years, totally free-form. About 18 years ago we started a music library using .flac. I just looked, and there are presently 432,119 titles in the general music library. It occupies 6.9 terabytes. The master is on a RAID array, it gets updated to a backup drive daily that's read-only. That's what the broadcasters use to play music. It also gets backed up bi-weekly to two alternate RAID arrays, so that if it should somehow be corrupted (ransomware) and the encrypted drive gets backed up we still have one week to discover it and go back.
The whole thing has been updated over the years (obviously) but still costs way less than $1,000 a year on average to keep running reliably. Oh - and using vorbis tags embedded in the .flac file allows you to keep all of the metadata with the actual music, instead of the weird scheme used by Itunes where it stores the metadata in a separate file.
I realize we're a total outlier, but the system is a joy to use, and it sounds fantastic.
Dave B.
Please post a link to the station.
There are way too many stations still running everything on Windows XP systems with no real plan if the computer or drive crashes.
I have friends working at multiple automation companies in support roles and the answer from those stations is either they have no money to upgrade or don't have an idea what they're doing. There's no backups, computers on open internet, etc..
There's a publicly traded company whose cluster in a PPM market is currently dealing with audio dropouts because their bandwidth gets affected when a salesperson is watching a video on Youtube.