The difference in your example, is you would be live at the event/remote. Delay of getting your audio back to the station wouldn't be a concern, but claiming you were live at the remote if you weren't? That's against the rules.
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“This program may be pre-recorded”
- Thread starter placebo1969
- Start date
99% sure KISW is voicetracked outside BJ & Migs and The Men's Room with DJ's working from home, hence Audacy putting the disclaimer.
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The tech has certainly changed how radio stations present talent/shows. The days of off the cuff accidental mistakes/errors are mostly gone. What you hear today is mostly pre-recorded. Not to say some still don't do it live, but this is shrinking.
*KUBE 93 has entered the chat*
I'm sure if you listen carefully to your old records, you can hear the splices in the reel to reel tape. You don't hear those splices anymore either.
I would have thought Castle was live. I know everything on KZOK besides mornings is voicetracked. It's really obvious to me.
He's 50/50 live vs tracked. Big shows are live, the others are locally tracked with some live.
Obvious because they seem to have so many issues with it. KJR-FM seems to have done a better job with keeping their programming consistent with enough "local" flavor. Robin Rock's midday show always involves personalized voice tracks that fit the market well.
I think ideally, we'd all like it to be live and local again. Hell. Screw the computers and bring back the turntables (can't ransomware those. 
)
But that's not where we are anymore. And it's only going to get worse as the midday girl who weirdly gets the dial position of the station screwed up is replaced a completely and eerily natural sounding A.I. replica of herself. Just as perky, at exactly the right frequencies, pitch and even key. Or your replacement, who's really just a glorified Speak N' Spell poseur version of yourself that you have to live down somehow as you sit it out ...
Then (and here's the scary part), we could have a real "Invasion of The Voice Snatchers" problem in radio and across the audio content platforms. On top of everything else happening right now. Lovely.
And to paraphrase Douglas Adams, this is where whole planets start unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake; Can you copyright your own voice (even if you naturally sound like somebody else)? What about digital voice signatures and this tech? How far back can one accurately digitally recreate a deceased human's voice? And would it be ethical, right or smart to use that level of tech for anything in a world leery enough of mainstream media? Or basic reality?
Because, with deepfake audio they're already making on social media, such as maliciously manipulating the Bidens voices to say things they did not say. And this new A.I. whatever potentially in mainstream use and a disappointingly far more gullible than ever imagined public, we're on a collision course with a real Supreme Court level iceberg.
It might be easy to disprove a quote in deepfake made about a political figure. But for celebrities and the general public, this could be a problem. And how far limits go on fair use of voices and their veracity.
)But that's not where we are anymore. And it's only going to get worse as the midday girl who weirdly gets the dial position of the station screwed up is replaced a completely and eerily natural sounding A.I. replica of herself. Just as perky, at exactly the right frequencies, pitch and even key. Or your replacement, who's really just a glorified Speak N' Spell poseur version of yourself that you have to live down somehow as you sit it out ...
Then (and here's the scary part), we could have a real "Invasion of The Voice Snatchers" problem in radio and across the audio content platforms. On top of everything else happening right now. Lovely.
And to paraphrase Douglas Adams, this is where whole planets start unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake; Can you copyright your own voice (even if you naturally sound like somebody else)? What about digital voice signatures and this tech? How far back can one accurately digitally recreate a deceased human's voice? And would it be ethical, right or smart to use that level of tech for anything in a world leery enough of mainstream media? Or basic reality?
Because, with deepfake audio they're already making on social media, such as maliciously manipulating the Bidens voices to say things they did not say. And this new A.I. whatever potentially in mainstream use and a disappointingly far more gullible than ever imagined public, we're on a collision course with a real Supreme Court level iceberg.
It might be easy to disprove a quote in deepfake made about a political figure. But for celebrities and the general public, this could be a problem. And how far limits go on fair use of voices and their veracity.
That may be you, but not me. I have no desire to babysit a console again.
You can. There's a whole legal business today around protecting image and likeness. It's a big deal for college athletes right now. It could become a thing for professional voice talent. The voice of the US Naval Observatory master clock gets paid, even though it's automated.
Having said that, for every station that's built on VT and syndication, there are others who promote being live & local. Radio is not one thing. There are many ways to approach it.
I tend to think everything except some morning shows are tracked these days. That being said, I've heard remotes being tracked on two occasions. First, someone posted a link here of someone laying down tracks at KYPT from Seafair. Next, I heard a jock on a station out of Joplin MO doing a remote from a bar. The first remote ran as it was supposed to, but then somehow what was supposed to be a track to be played later got out over the air during a song, and you heard the guy doing like three takes of the same break.
I'd be shocked to see a truly live remote in the modern era. There are too many variables that you can't control, and hosts don't particularly care for doing cut-ins live either. They would much rather have a few takes at their disposal.
I work for a station part time, remote (used to be full time, local) that does live remotes using cleanfeed.net and a 4g hot spot. works pretty well.
I will say, that as much as we complain about live VS. recorded content these days, an automated station sounds a heck of a lot better today than it did in the '70s. No, I wasn't alive back then, but I've heard airchecks, and they aren't that pleasant to listen to. Possibly the only exception, though I can't confirm, is Stereo Rock. I have a compilation of Wolfman Jack airchecks that include a prerecorded phone bit, and you can tell based on the audio alone that the bit was prerecorded. You don't get that today.
Just to be clear; only a certain sector of humanity in particular, that regularly visits this site, even cares. And that's a pretty small number as compared with all radio listeners.
Feel like I'm about to tell someone there is no Tooth Fairy... All Bob Smith's (aka The Wolfman) phone bits were prerecorded. That workflow was commonplace. You rolled tape and recorded calls one at a time between songs. When you finally got someone interesting, or were requesting a song coming up in your playlist, you might keep that call to make it seem like you complied with their request. That call could have even come in a day or more prior.
Especially in the old days of Top40 radio, one would be a fool to put some caller on the air live. We used to affectionately call the typical repeater slate of callers: "Tweaks", "Q-Balls" "Ramblers" and "Zoomers".
Well, to be fair, most phone content is pre-recorded today too. Some morning shows and talk shows still take live calls (assuming they have an audio dump button), but that's about the full extent of it. Every other host out there is recording calls to a vox pro, re-recording themselves to fit the timing requirements, and pressing "play" at the optimal time.
Pre-recorded content can certainly sound pretty good in the modern era. iHeart seems to do this pretty successfully. They certainly do better than KNTB 1480 did back in the early 2000's. If I recall, they had a tape of music that they would play every single day with the same songs in the same order.
We had automation at KOL 50+ years ago. Don Whitman used automation nearly 60 years ago on KITI and KITN. More than a coupIe of Seattle FM stations were automated that long ago. It's just that over the years we've gone from Seeburg record changers, to reel-to-reel, to CDs, to computers, and now we have the ultimate... computers and voice-tracking. Leading national 24/7 programming services voice-track 24/7 and call it "near real-time". Now, just about every station I'm aware of uses VT in most day-parts. Coming up next is AI. If the artificial voice is aired live out of the computer, is that voice-tracking?
And, when on XERF and XERB/XEPRS the show was recorded real time the day before and taken on tape across the border for broadcast 24 hours later.
Like all mediums, radio is changing. We can all chime in how great it used to be, but the truth is it doesn’t matter. Local stations mean very little to most listeners. Yes, some local news might be attractive to some listeners, but nowadays you can just use your iPhone to get what you need.
Until the format changes, or a power failure knocks them off the air, or until someone on the staff leaves, or until a change happens that gets people's attention. Until then, yes, they're as dependable as any other appliance in the house.
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