Tools I Use To Support My Radio Show

Posted on June 27th, 2008 in Music by admin

A few folks have asked about which process I go about producing my ‘Sunday Morning Jazz’ radio show on KRUA.

Below chronicles how I do it…please keep in mind there are a great many methods and tools out there…this is merely my method, though I’ve tried quite a few things over the years.

Firstly, unless I’m out of town on vacation or emergency business, my show is LIVE! Yes I’m really there, I take calls, and I play requests.

iTunes

All my music is digitized and resides on an upgraded MacBook (320 GB hard drive). I will prior to the show date compile my shows tunes into a playlist and patch the computer into the station sound board for play over the air. Two great reasons to do this…1-I don’t have to tug loose media around for each show, and B-I have every bit of  my music at my fingertips for any requests.

beaTunes

One of the tools I use to keep my digital library tidy. Though beaTunes is touted as a tool for the building of playlists (compiling like songs and such), I find it is most useful in the scanning and identification of music files finding dupes, improper labels, and misspellings.

Music Brainz

From the Music Brainz website:

MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

Tune Ranger

This is pretty cool tool to sync two platforms over a network. So here’s my scenario: I have a Windows desktop and rip everything onto it, but I drag a MacBook into the studio for the show…see what I mean? I had to transfer the music file from iTunes (easy enough) to an external hard drive and then onto the laptop. Again, not hard, but at 120 gigs, the transfer took about TWO HOURS…each way!!! This is a seriously cool program.

Adobe Audition

This is the program the station uses to produce anything for play, so I decided to spring for it to keep everything simple. I tried the free Audacity but it just wasn’t working for me. Others use Sony’s Sound Forge, Pro Tools, and even Garage Band by Apple.

Wikipedia

Awesome for research of artists and of the tunes themselves.

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Now playing: Shemekia Copeland - Salt In My Wounds
via FoxyTunes