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HOW DOES VOICE TRACKING WORK?

J

Jimme

I am not in the industry, so please excuse my ignorance. I love the overnight classical music show on WETA Washington hosted by John Chester. Mr, Chester is on EVERY night, seven nights a week, from midnight to six a.m. in addition to his normal duties hosting a midday three hour show and sometimes chatting with the preceding noontime host. Unless John is VERY dedicated to his craft, he must be pre-recording the overnight show somehow, possibly by this "voice tracking" people here dislike.

My question is, how does voice tracking work? Is everything you are going to say written out before you start and you just repeat phrases one after another and a technician later splices the phrases in over the course of the show as needed. (All he ever says between each 20 or 30 minute piece is things like, "Here's Haydn now with the Drumroll Symphony number 95" - then music - then fifteen minutes later "It's Chopin's turn now - concerto 4 in D" - then more music. It seems a six hour show could be laid on tape quite fast.

I was just curious. How is voice tracking accomplished and could it be used to introduce classical music as I suspect the overnight show is created? And a shout out to John Chester!
 
There is no staff involved in voicetracking except for yourself. If you start at 7pm, you simply scroll down to the time frame in the log. Right click, start a voicetrack session. You begin playing the outro of the song you will be coming out of, open the mic, intro the next song, and trigger the next song all within 3 keystrokes. The sequence is saved and it plays on the air exactly how you recorded it. You then go down 20 minutes later to the next scheduled break, do it again. You can keep it as tight as you want. You are basically doing everything you would be doing live, but recording it into the system. The audio files save automatically and you can even adjust them if you wish. Voicetracking a 5 hour show can take 20-30 minutes, depending on what you have going on promotional wise, the quality and care the jock puts into his show, or the lengh of the breaks. Listeners don't know the difference unless you get burned by breaking news. You can even tighten up the segues of any song. Alot of jocks record their shows days ahead of time prior to their vacation, eliminating the need for fill-in talent. He records his overnight show after his midday show and probably puts in a 40 hour week or less in the building.
 
Jimme said:
My question is, how does voice tracking work? Is everything you are going to say written out before you start and you just repeat phrases one after another and a technician later splices the phrases in over the course of the show as needed. (All he ever says between each 20 or 30 minute piece is things like, "Here's Haydn now with the Drumroll Symphony number 95" - then music - then fifteen minutes later "It's Chopin's turn now - concerto 4 in D" - then more music. It seems a six hour show could be laid on tape quite fast.
Click to expand...

These days, stations don't play records, tape, CDs; everything is a computer file. The automation system is a PC with software that plays the program log. The announcer records whatever announcements he would make on a live program, each announcement is a separate computer file. These "voice tracks" are then inserted into the program log in the proper places, and the computer plays it on the air.

Where I work, the program director voice-tracks his 2-6pm shift, he says it takes about a half-hour to record the four-hour shift. He does AM drive live on our other FM station.

The voice tracks can be recorded at the local station, at another station, or delivered by satellite from a network.
 
jh said:
The voice tracks can be recorded at the local station, at another station, or delivered by satellite from a network.
Click to expand...

You can even do it in your PJ's from home and email it to the station.
 
Or you can do it from a central location like say, San Antonio, and send it to 1000 stations all over the country where they'll all sound exactly the same. ;)
 
RadeoEngineer said:
Or you can do it from a central location like say, San Antonio, and send it to 1000 stations all over the country where they'll all sound exactly the same. ;)
Click to expand...

That sounds like something that some financial backers might dream up... LOL.
 
Jimme said:
My question is, how does voice tracking work?
Click to expand...

Jimme, I get the idea you have little or no technical vision of how Voice Tracking works. Do you know how to make audio recordings on your computer and then play them back? If not, find a Nerd that does and let them demonstrate for you the marvels and mysteries of .wav files and .mp3 files.

I suspect a lot of people use two terms interchangeably but to me the two terms have slightly different meanings. The first one is AUTOMATION. The programming you hear on any radio station today has a high probability of originating in an AUTOMATION MACHINE. The early versions (starting somewhere around the late 1950s) used tape recorders with large, large reels of music. Various devices were used to play-back commercials, station breaks, etc. There were mechanical timers that looked like they had been born in a washing machine factory. You could set a timer so that the promo, station ID or whatever was on the device tied to that timer held up it's hand and told the music tape (once every 15 minutes) "I need to run when you get to the end of the current track... probably a music track." Another timer might be set to hold up it's hand every 5 minutes and and say to the music tape: "I need to run when you get to the end of the current track,."

The first automation machine I ever saw had a Seeburg jukebox "guts" that played 45 RPM records for music content and had one big spool of tape where every announcement, commercial, PSA or whatever was on that tape in the order it was to play back. No last minute program changes with that thing. (Gates Nightwatch).

Today the whole process lives inside a computer. (Multiple computers can be networked together.) The washing machine timers are gone. Programmers create machine logic that can consider anything you want to use in deciding WHEN a give audio file will play. I guess someone somewhere has included logic to consider the phase of the moon in decided what to do next. There must be 15 or so vendors selling competing, highly sophisticated software to make decisions and make them happen the way a live person would have years ago.

Some specialty programming, some types of music programming just grind out. Small markets in particular. Play the music. Play the commercial. Repeat as necessary. But in major competitive markets where they want to capture certain aspects of the concept of a host or a DJ, VOICE TRACKING takes place. A person of talent sits down somewhere, gathers his/her show prep, and records customized short voice segments that will follow a given music recording. If a station plans to do this type of programming, they will look at all the competing automation machines available and select one that has all the capabilities they want for their style of programming. And the software vendor will include a program that can be on another computer in the next room, in the talent's apartment across town, or in a location seven states away, and as the host/dj/personality records all the little drop-in tid-bits of voice, they are give file names, inaudible beeps and tones, so that the VOICE TRACK recordings can be identified by the master automation machine and played back BY THE COMPUTER in such a way that it comes out sounding like the person is right there and is live.... if the PERSON has the right talent to pull it off.

If you want to understand it all better, there are some automation software packages that can be downloaded for free, or for a limited time trial period. You can put one on your computer, load in 10 or 15 music recordings, a dozen fake commercials, create something that sounds like a station promo, and you can have your home computer sounding like a little radio station.

Radio stations do not appear to be as "visitor friendly" as they once were, but if you live in a smaller market, you may find that your local radio station would let you come in and see what they use, allow you to sit in the studio while someone prepares program content and then when you get home you can HEAR what you saw IN THE MAKING.
 
johnarbuckle said:
There is no staff involved in voicetracking except for yourself. If you start at 7pm, you simply scroll down to the time frame in the log. Right click, start a voicetrack session. You begin playing the outro of the song you will be coming out of, open the mic, intro the next song, and trigger the next song all within 3 keystrokes. The sequence is saved and it plays on the air exactly how you recorded it. You then go down 20 minutes later to the next scheduled break, do it again. You can keep it as tight as you want. You are basically doing everything you would be doing live, but recording it into the system. The audio files save automatically and you can even adjust them if you wish. Voicetracking a 5 hour show can take 20-30 minutes, depending on what you have going on promotional wise, the quality and care the jock puts into his show, or the lengh of the breaks. Listeners don't know the difference unless you get burned by breaking news. You can even tighten up the segues of any song. Alot of jocks record their shows days ahead of time prior to their vacation, eliminating the need for fill-in talent. He records his overnight show after his midday show and probably puts in a 40 hour week or less in the building.
Click to expand...
That is the best explanation to someone not in the business I have heard...good job.
 
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