Every radio station should have a sound check. As an on air DJ, I like to occasionally record my show and listen to it later, to determine if there is anything I can do to improve or, heaven forbid, hear if I made any mistakes. I want the show to be the best it can be, and this extra feedback helps. I’m sure other DJs at WUMD like to do the same thing.
That’s why I wrote SoundCheck. It runs on a computer and records continuously, and saves the recording every so many minutes (default to 15). I have it set now to also encode the output to MP3.
Additionally, it triggers another program of mine, SendFTP, which then sends the recording to the web site storage area, where the various DJ’s can go and download the segments of interest.
The web site code keeps the sound files for 8 days.
I have the files now encoding at a bit rate of 56k/s, which a 10-minute MP3 is about 4.20M bytes. That equates to about 605M a day or around 4.25G a week. I’d need to own a bit more online disk space if I wanted to keep much more than a week.
SoundCheck is also great when I have on air interviews, guests from theatre groups around the area. The automatic recording frees me up from having to worry about it at the time of the interview. I know it’s being recorded, and I can go grab it off the web site later. (As long as I get to it fast enough, before it gets automatically deleted!)
I’ll be experimenting with different encoding rates, especially a variable bit rate, which may let me record at a better quality at not so much expense of disk space.
There’s also the possibility of keeping files online longer by having the clean up routine access the station schedule, and delete hours where automation was know to be running, keeping only the files recorded while a live DJ was on the air.
