Real World Computing

The equipment and skills required for putting a show together are pretty basic, and you can get good results with a standard PC and a basic multimedia microphone. The recording environment should be quiet (so turn off that mobile phone) and acoustically 'dead', which is to say you should use your living room in preference to your bathroom.

Start out with a decent- quality multimedia microphone or, if you're really serious, something like the MXL Desktop Recording Kit. On the software side, something like Adobe's Audition is ideal and is in fact a standard in the radio industry, but any decent audio editor with a recording facility will do. Check out the shareware package Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) if you don't already have something suitable. I covered both these products back in issue 133, p198.

1. First decide what kind of program you want to make. The simplest kind is a general programme of music separated with spoken links. Map out the format with a track order and signature tune to 'top and tail' the programme.

2. If you haven't done much voice recording before, you'll need to spend some time on developing microphone technique. Too close and you'll get 'popping' as the plosive consonants overload the microphone capsule; too far away and the voice will sound distant. A useful way to get close while reducing popping is to speak across the microphone rather than directly at it, which is known as an off-axis mic orientation.

3. In the actual session, have a simple script but don't just read it off the page word-for-word, as this will give a very stilted sound. Try to get a natural sound, remembering that you're having a conversation with your listeners (albeit one sided). Be careful of extraneous sounds like page turns, lip smacking and noises from outside, as these can't be removed later. Have a good listen to what you've just recorded and make sure you actually said what you meant to say (voice-over artists and radio announcers say the damnedest things sometimes without realising it).

4. Once you've recorded the links, you'll need to combine them with the tracks you've chosen. Make the pauses between the music sound natural - it's common practice to slightly overlap the link voice over the end of the previous track. Be careful that the relative volume of the links and the tracks is fairly constant. If your audio editor has a compressor add-on, you may want to use this on the finished programme and then normalise the result to make it more 'radio friendly'.

5. If the programme is destined for the Internet, you'll need to encode it as an MP3, WMA or AAC file, depending on the site's technical requirements. If you're encoding as an MP3, you'll need to make sure you use a decent encoder, since the free ones often give very poor results at the lower data rates required for Internet radio.

	1 A simple recording setup; a quiet space, an audio editor and a decent microphone is all you need.

	2 Audio post-production for radio is as simple adjusting the levels of the source materials and sorting out the transition from one sound file to the next.