IS IT LIVE OR IS IT MEMOREX?

posted by James Reel

The main reason I’ve hardly been blogging during the past few months is that I’m just too busy with other duties around here. At the beginning of summer, Arizona Public Media—suffering from the same budget crunch as the rest of the University of Arizona—had to lay off a few employees, including KUAT-FM’s afternoon announcer and its music director. Since the goal was to save money, those people’s work had to be taken on by employees who were already salaried, meaning, primarily, Bill Luckhardt and me.

Bill has for some time been a combo weekend announcer/assistant to the music director. Thanks to Bill, a backlog of more than a thousand CDs that were electronically “lost” several years ago during a transition from one computerized library system to another finally got entered into our current database. That means that at this writing, counting new acquisitions, we have a working library of 6132 classical compact discs.

When we lost those two full-timers, it fell mainly to Bill and me, with technical help from a few others, to split their most essential duties. I’ll tell you about the music-directing job in a future post. Today I’ll just let you in on a little secret: On weekdays, everything you hear in the afternoon after I leave at 12:01 p.m. is recorded (except for the three NPR newsbreaks). Here’s how it works.

Long gone are the days when our evening concert programs were played back from 12-inch open-reel tapes that were mailed to us by distributors. With the advent of a satellite distribution system sometime around 1980, the shows were beamed down to us from some other place, and we recorded them on our own tape machines—first those 12-inch open reels, then digitally onto VHS videotape, then on little Digital Audio Tapes designed specifically for the purpose. During the current decade, we made one more transition: Everything from the network that we don’t carry live, whether sent by satellite or over the Internet, is recorded onto and played back from computer hard drives. So we’ve now extended that idea to our local afternoon programming.

To get started, someone—the weekend announcers, or our production supervisor or program director—takes a music schedule, pulls the shift’s CDs from the shelf, and burns the necessary tracks to the computer drive. (It takes only a few seconds to transfer a 45-minute symphony to the computer, as you know if you’ve done it at home.) Our program director, Ed K (the budget is so limited that his last name has been reduced to a single letter), then puts all the pieces into proper order via the scheduling software in our so-called Audio Vault computer system.

Next, Bill or I will sit down in a little production studio with two logs in front of us, just like when we’re live. One is the music log, telling us what to play when and who’s performing, and the other is the program log, telling us what underwriting announcements and program promos to read and when. We then record each of our breaks individually, plugging them in between the music tracks. If we make a bad mistake, we can go back and record it again, which is a luxury (and responsibility) we don’t have when we’re live. It takes me about 20 to 25 minutes to record my contributions to the 4-7 p.m. segment, which I generally do during my regular air shift, when I’ve got longish pieces playing.

The next day, I press a few buttons at the end of my live shift, so that at 12:01 the automated system kicks in and plays back all the recorded elements we’ve stitched together. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the computer goes insane if it can’t deal with some errant little command lurking in the system. Usually it works.

When I’ve explained this setup to friends, they’ve said they can’t tell the difference between the recorded and live segments of the day. Can you?