Need Assistance on Processing

[Goat Rodeo Cowboy]

A good side-question has been brought up here:

Why CAN'T stations do most of their gain riding, equalization, & compression on a track by track basis in the production booth?

I understand there's lots of places for peaks to get out of hand, but it seems like you could create the "sound" (density, etc) on each song and element and then use a final peak limiter or safety clipper to control overshoots before hitting the transmitter.

You might say, "levels may be different," but if you're on an automation system using digital files, everything can be easily controlled.

I have a few too many gray hairs, and I learned how to ride gain, do production booth work, and adjust peak limiters and compressors back in the days of TUBES. When it comes to adjusting today's digital, integrated-circuit devices, I am a bit of a neophyte and a whole lot puzzled.

Unless you have big, big budgets for really sophisticated hardware, once you get your production room devices adjusted to deal with a track and create something that will have the "aura" of being about the same volume and consistency of the material around it, you need for ALL the tracks you want to feed into your "now preset device" to start out at somewhere the same average volume as you original track you were working with when you created the pre-sets.

I edit recordings of the happenings in a house of worship... to put on CD and to stream on the web. Done right it takes me a time-ratio of SIX TO ONE to complete the task. A one hour lecture by a professor takes SIX HOURS to edit and compress and burn to disc.

How many people working on the production booth a radio stations today have that kind of time luxury?

 

[GeneSavage]

Goat Rodeo Cowboy: I never said it was CONVENIENT.

So, it sounds like this might be desirable, but highly impractical... now I know!

It goes back to what I suggested earlier: on-the-fly processing is the "quick n dirty" way to get it done because the method I proposed would take h-o-u-r-s per track. (I'm still not totally convinced of that, since you're not dealing with raw live audio, you're dealing with pre-produced album tracks... but I'll go with it for now.)

It's fun to dream of such a station, though...

 

[Tom Wells]

I fully agree with GRC's asessment of production time per running time.
As I add music to my part 15 AM automation, I'm using Nero software. The best method I've come up with now is
to record straight to laptop, then edit the file. Assuming this is the average 45, I must

Well, first I must wash the record and play wet while occaisionally spritzing my favorite secret solution.
then,
1.trim heads and tails
2. apply declicking and/or decrackling
3.apply gain to a too-weak intro, or other parts of a song including massive de-fadeout so the "whole song" plays.
4 Maybe edit out a few major clicks manually.
5. Listen to on air .
6. Continue editing, perhaps using frequency eq, decide if prior gain-riding was appropriate with new EQ.
7. Consider adding software compression, test how that sounds and how your audio file looks ( how FAT )
8 .listen to again on-air, to see how it fits in with the average audio of all the other elements.

An average 3 minute 45, with a few flaws to work on can easily take 18 minutes to make ready for airing.

I do find this convenient and not at all impractical.
When I hear the song on the air, I get to grade my work.
Everything plays through Breakaway, the cheap tube wetbox, with all processors using light control.
And gets reverb added on a side chain , so I must listen to how the reverb % apparent works with the density of each record.
If something is TOO FULL, or too weak, I'll go back and re-do from the 45 ( or whatever ).
The reverb stays at one setting,
so it makes a big difference to normalize tracks at a common level.
If a track is as loud as possibly can be crushed, you almost can't hear any reverb in it.
Then as any room opens in the density of the recording, more and more of the reverb can "show".
Running it that way sounds huge, but requires all the steps and checking as above to be consistently huge.

It's worth it because a record that was formerly too much work to play very much due to flaws, can now be "played"
at any time, without physical damage to the record, and sounds about 100 times better than anything you could
do on the fly without 2 assistants to wash records for you, and a full time gain-riding human.