[Ty Ford]

Hello Conrad and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

You raise interesting questions. Can you show us some before and after samples to let us hear if we can hear the artifacts that Richard is concerned about?

I once had a client for radio spots. He was also the voice talent and copywriter. He usually over-wrote the spots and could never get the copy done in 60 seconds. I had an Ultra Harmonizer with extra RAM and time compression. We found that for his voice and the copy, we could speed him up by 11% before his voice sounded weird. Slowing down is a bigger problem because you’re stretching the audio instead of pulling out bits and pieces. In his case, of course, we were speeding him up (without pitch change). We actually got to liking the energy from the speed boost.

Thanks!

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

well there’s the link to the H5 recorder i left for you in my previous post.

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Justin,

Got it. Cool.

How would, “Peter, Not The Wolf”, a world/fusion piece I just finished hit Koreography?
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/tyford7

Same question about my meditational pieces based on the Sanskrit Chakra System.
How would Koreography react to cut #7? “Universal Chakra” (aka “Bliss”) https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/tyford4

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Hello Evan and welcome to the Cow audio Forum.

Who’s Bill and why is he shadowing you?

I reviewed the Zoom H5 some time ago and thought it was a useful piece of gear. Here it is.
https://tyfordaudiovideo.blogspot.com/2014/08/zoom-h5-somewhere-between-4-and-6.html

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Hello Noam and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

I have produced 182 half-hour shows for Dr. Paul Christo at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutes. They run on Sirius/XM and are also available……

on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/aches-and-gains-with-dr-paul-christo/id1233732954?mt=2

and his web site. https://paulchristomd.com/recordings/

I have done every one of them on Pro Tools, but purchased Logic Pro X in January of this year. I think the workflow would be the same.

You want to create a master template. Once created, you use a copy of it for each show. The master template has show intro, music beds, breaks and other announcements that you want to happen in approximately the right places.

You make raw interview recordings. Paul uses Skype with Call Recorder to make split-track files. We import them and begin the editing process. We always re-track Paul’s questions in the studio because it sounds better. Editing the show is a time consuming process. It takes 6-8 hours to edit a half hour show. I use EQ and noise reduction to improve the audio. After I use automation to get the mixes right, I hit the button and render out a 24-bit .wav file. It goes in the project folder. I upload the right files to a server and they are downloaded for use on the air.

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Hello Justin and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

Thanks for the well written explanation (and thanks to Richard Crowley’s points). I’m at this from several sides; as a producer and also as a music creator. I have an account at Harry Fox and use it as needed to cover (pardon the expression) material from others that I record and produce. Their Song File has been very helpful.

Bard and Koreographer look interesting. I don’t have time for that rabbit hole today, but will revisit them. Tim Westergren, as some will know, created a system for helping his clients communicated what music they wanted him to create. After creating this system, friends told him that he had created a great set of algorithms for streaming music and as a result, we now have Pandora. Are Bard and Koreographer similar?

Here’s the Pandora Part of the story I wrote after speaking to Tim somewhere around 2007. I believe he left the company in 2017.

PANDORA.COM
Tim Westergren founded Padora.com seven years ago as a result of his own
experience as a musician and film composer. ³I was spending a lot of time
finding my clients¹ music taste so I could write for them. After a while I
got pretty good at zeroing in on what they wanted. The thought occurred to me
that if I could ³bottle it² and create an effective interface I could do
something with it.² What Westergren has bottled is a complex
highly-interactive database that allows users to enter the name of a group,
musician or song they like and let the database create a personal ³radio
channel² or playlist of similar music. By name, The Music Genome Project.

As the pieces of music are served up, the listener gets to choose whether
those pieces stay in rotation, aren¹t heard as often or are deleted.
Listeners can also click on the selections and be routed to Amazon where they
can buy CDs or to iTunes where they can purchase individual cuts

Westergren says a song or a group¹s popularity is not a criteria. ³Relevance
is the only thing that drives us; relevance for each individual listener.
Right now each listener can have 100 different stations and the more they
curate them, the more personalized they become.

Creating such a database is not easy feat. The Pandora library currently
holds about 420,000 pieces of music and has been adding nearly 15,000 pieces
of music every month. Pandora employs forty-eight trained music analysts.
Having a music major is a requirement. Each analyst must take 150 hours of
training to prepare for the task. Training takes place at the Oakland, CA
headquarters. Westergren says, after training, analysts may spend twenty to
thirty minutes categorizing each piece of music. The result is that each song
has a four hundred point DNA-like database profile that is used to predict
what songs a listener might like.

Last year Pandora caught the attention of Microsoft and an ad revenue sharing
deal was quickly made. For now and in the foreseeable future, Westergren says
ads will be visible on the page, but not audible. Now, with 5 million
subscribers nationally, Westergren has opened offices in London and Tokyo to
take the project international, where they are making performance rights
deals with organizations in different countries.

According to the WiMAX Forum (https://www.wimax.org), you can deploy a WiMax system
and get throughput up to 40 megabits per second for upload and download per
channel, for a range of 3 to 10 kilometers. The revolution may not be
televised after all. Instead it may be webcast.

Ty Ford has been writing for Radio World since 1986. He may be reached at
https://www.tyford.com.

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Yes, at the very least!

I had a job some years back. I told the guy what I was hearing in the camera return didn’t sound good. He said all the sound guys say that. I was also recording on my 664 (because I could).

He called me when he got back home and confirmed the audio was not good and asked me to check my mixer (Ha!). I did, it was fine. He said he took his camera somewhere else and they also said his camera audio was bad. Fortunately, I had double recorded. I had just gotten my Sound Devices 664 and was wanting to try it out. He was very thankful.

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Chris,

Yes, being there to save the show with external audio is a very good thing, especially when trying to make it happen on a DSLR. It can make you a hero in a second.

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

Hello Chris and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

DSLRs can be very funky when it comes to the quality of the audio they record.

I don’t know where the Canon 80D sits on that spectrum. Most DSLRs default to some auto-level mode and that needs to be disabled.

I think your new business partners don’t really know how to shoot and record audio properly. You really don’t want a mixer mounted on your camera. It’s very difficult to mix and shoot properly at the same time. It sounds like you need a new mixer so you can separately adjust the levels and feed that to the camera. Once learned, syncing externally recorded audio to the computer timeline is pretty easy these days.

The AVX1, while interesting, lacks full 48 V Phantom Power for professional condenser mics. It’s price point makes me very nervous. The Sound Device MixPre D is a preferable choice because of its quality, sturdiness and feature set. You can even plug it into a Mac or PC and record to the computer. Yes, way more expensive, but a proper piece of gear that will last a long time and provide excellent audio from the beginning. https://bhpho.to/2OsAQZ1

The lowball approach only leads to disappointment and unhappiness for you and your clients.

Regards,

Ty Ford
Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog

[Ty Ford]

well that was 6 years ago…..

Just sayin’ ☺

Ty Ford Cow Audio Forum Leader

Want better production audio?: Ty Ford\’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Ty Ford Blog: Ty Ford\’s Blog