Dvorak and Curry, Podcast Production and Radio Standardization
Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak open episode 625 by discussing their differing technical workflows for clipping audio, including Dvorak's accidental use of caps lock. Dvorak recounts his 1980s media tour for a telecommunications book, noting the lack of standardization across various radio station control rooms. The hosts compare modern digital recording tools like Audio Hijack Pro against older hardware like Gates mixing boards.
adam curry· john c. dvorak· caps lock· zoom recorder· audio hijack pro· radio stations· standardization
00:00 Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak It's Thursday June 12th 2014 it's time for your Get Monation Media Assassination this is episode 625 This Is No Agenda Counting down the days to six weeks and coming to you from FEMA Region Six here in the Travis Heights hideout in the capital of The Drone Star State In the morning everybody I'm Adam Curry And from Northern Silicon Valley where its always nice I am John C. Dvorak Yeah, it's always nice. No it's not! You get gloomy days and crappy stuff Can I ask you a question? I wish you would And this is... It's just... I don't want to come across as... I'm not trying to embarrass you, I'm just trying to understand something Do you type blindly on the keyboard? I'm sure you do right? You know, I'm looking at the list of clips and I knew that was the question
00:58 So the question stands do you type blindly how does this work because Clearly as we know the C stands for caps lock and it was locked So your typing shift and all of your clips start with a lowercase, and the rest is all uppercase. It's a little weird Yeah yeah I noticed this after the fact that wasn't about to go back and fix it Because they're just names of clips. I know what they are, i'm just trying to understand your process you know so I record... You can see where it happened here it's under the... No! I know where it happened but... Somewhere caps lock and from there on all the clips But your process is different from mine so apparently you have
01:39 You record all these clips and they have different names, and you go back and change all the names one after another. That's not how it works at all! Oh... How does your process work? Okay so I use a H2N and i have this little recorder and I hook it to the DISH network audio out and then I save clips on the DVR put them into the recorder so you just move them from here to there. And then when something on the computer that I want to pull down from the interwebs, I hook this up to the sound system and I just pull it down. So I end with a bunch of clips... All on Zoom? Yeah they all say zoom one
02:23 one, two, three. And most of these clips some of them are combos I mean there may be two or three clips within one of the recordings and then in the morning because I have to do these in the morning hour and the reason is that I've done it at night before but then I have to be extremely careful about what I name the clips because you can't use so many clips you can't... What was this one? For example here's a couple here if I had not just recorded Canter wiped out. I mean, we might forget what that's about right? And so then I make the clips in the morning and then I title them something that would just be some simple that you can find when i'm talking about it and at the same time something I can remember what was So again, when your titling
03:14 How does that work? How can it be that you don't see that your caps is locked, I don't understand how. Or you see it...I mean, strange. Well in this case, I was typing away and when you do it, you just got your clip and then you export it and then give it a name and hit return key And its out of there and I was just doing these things one after another Before I actually looked down and saw what i was typing. There's so many typos in there too! Yeah, no your process is so much... but first of all that's a lot of work people don't realize and that's not true from time to time someone will say hey you know I clipped this for you holy crap it took me half a day to do one clip how do you guys do it?
03:56 Because my process is different. Of course I have a dedicated studio and everything's kind of set up all the time, and i also use the DVR so if I see something I'll rewind yeah I'll rewind and then I use what is it Audio Hijack Pro so I title it as I'm recording so I don't have that intermediary step And I recorded direct to MP3 onto... Oh, see the difference between you and me in that regard because if i did that it would just be That would actually add an additional step Because many times like say I had a clip from Democracy Now! That has Amy going on about two or three things. Right. I can't title that clip because its really not a finished clip.
04:42 I'm not doing finished clips at the beginning. I mean, I'm taking pieces of things and then I am listening to them more carefully and then clipping out... Then I'm editing. I'm doing more post-editing. So after so I just record but maybe five minutes and then so I have it already titled on my drive and then all edit If there's three clips in it, I'll edit it out and on you know titled one two or three It's interesting that you know six more than six years And I have no idea how you do your stuff on your end is the first time we've actually talked about it Yeah well You know everybody did that That's the thing about I noticed this some years back when I was I had my big telecom book out in the 80s and I got and they go
05:26 Tell us about which bitch big telecom book I had this big giant telecom book to work on Telecommunications like a thousand pages, and it was a big deal at McGraw Hill And they had put me on on it. Yeah, I gotta interrupt you. I think you're on Comcast I don't think you're on Sonic net I can tell the difference How crazy is that? How crazy is it that I can tell what network you're connected to? No, i'm actually on Sonic. Oh really hmm It says Hmm Is it breaking up yeah, it's giving its doing real comcast-y like stuff. It's okay Maybe it'll shake out so i'm sorry back to the telecom book So they put me on a radio tour A media tour radio and television around the country did you have a uh because of course this is back in The day did you have a limo
06:17 I was always offered a limo and i always refused. And did you have a PR girl? I don't like limos, I don't understand why people use them. I think town cars are great! I hate limos they're uncomfortable. I don't want somebody driving me around... You wanna drive yourself?! Did you have...? Because if I go to...I see stuff that I want to take a photo of or something and you can't sit with the driver he thinks your'e an idiot. Did you have a PR girl who traveled with you? No I had a PR girl that was coordinating everything but she wasn't traveling with me which is another thing I don't really like. Well, I've had it both ways and I have to say I kind of like it when you've got someone who's like can I get you something to drink? Yeah no see I'm not for any that. All that elitist crap as well. But yeah but I also had the someone to coif my hair and yeah okay well that was different but most this was radio anyway and what I noticed was actually one of my only takeaway from the whole experience
07:13 besides the fact that this is a huge waste of time and money. Although it probably does sell a few books, but it's still a waste of time. Not really... I don't believe- I think one or two books are sold. Yeah! One or two. I noticed the one thing that I took away was that every single radio station I visited was so alien to every other radio station in the way they were set up, and the way they operated. In the way their control rooms were and in the way guys worked. Some guy's you know there are guy working standing-up Tom Likas and you work standing up? I work standing up yeah. Some guys are on your own booth You know these guys only want to be near ya
07:50 There's a whole series and all the controls are all it's amazing. The difference from place to place is so outrageous that it's like there's no standardization whatsoever And I think that's the way in this in the whole audio game Which is why? I do what the way, I do it isn't alien probably to the way everyone else doesn't you the same thing with your gear which Is all customized well but top 40 top 40 stations are always the same They're always kind of like stand up. You know kind of the same setup aren't they no hmm? I worked a cow worked at a couple these places on and off and I mean there's a similarity that you could say is from place to place, but like the big giant stations in the Bay Area. I've worked at KGO and KSFO and they're just alien to each other everything is different
08:45 Sometimes it's not that different, but I mean it's always different though. It's not like a...it's not like the French nuclear power plants Do you remember the old top 40 stations where they had the board with the big? So they didn't have faders But they had the big knobs and then- The big pots Yeah And pre-fader listening You turn the knob all the way to left and go click and then on the left speaker you could Pre listen to whatever record you were queuing up Yeah, they had a little indent that you could pop it to that. We had one of those when I went to Foothill Junior College and our radio station had those and Leo has a Gates at the Twit Studios... Oh yeah, those are nice! ...that has been rebuilt and is in mint condition and that's the exact model you're talking about. Love it
09:32 You know what's so funny is if I say, you know someone has mentioned something about the sound and actually it sounds the same to me as normal. I get emails yeah no I noticed it's different! People don't understand that you can't just...that's not a qualifying statement It doesn't work like that anyway. It's about the content people. You just broke up. That was kind of funny Okay, how did we get on this? I don't remember why we you were asking me. How I guess why so why can't type And somehow we got to your thousand page book and you doing book tours. I'm not sure exactly what happened there It was a roundabout way Explaining why I can't type so what do you got oh
