Ask an Electronics Technician Online

Once you have you tracks mixed it’s time to break out the Music Mastering Software and use this simple Audio Mastering System to give your track that extra bit of shine. Most musicians tend to think that all they have to do is record a track and transfer it to a disc and then they could send it off to producers as a demo. Well, unless the amateur audio recording combined with phenomenal vocals is a miraculous success, chances are the demo will not be kept for further listening. The final step should be music mastering, but sadly a lot of musicians tend to skip this step.

Not everyone knows what mastering is. Music Mastering, is when the tracks are being refined for auditions or production. Touch-ups and enhancements are made on the album to make sure that all audio listening tools can play the music clearly.

Audio engineers are not exactly cheap to hire since there are a lot of hopeful musicians willing to pay big bucks to ensure that their demos will not get scrapped within the first 2 seconds of play. Although sheer talent is very important, professional sounding tracks help a lot with auditions.

Audio mastering also involves audio evaluation which helps give unbiased perspective to music tracks. Even though mixing engineers do not come cheap, they are sure to listen and re-listen to home audio recordings for hours to make sure that no rogue sound is included in the final product. Recording engineers make sure that the sounds remain crisp all the way through its play.

Music Mastering Software – Leveling Audio Volumes and Noise Reduction

Mastering technicians make certain that the volumes of the songs are at the same level. Audio engineers are needed in order to avoid unwanted standout sounds or noises. Audio levels should not be taken for granted because mistakes in leveling often aggravate listeners.

Audio engineers can make a lot of reduction from audio signals. Professional music mastering techniques produce top of the line music with minimum disturbance. Analog audio recording produces a normal hiss-like noise. Even though it can be minimized by music mastering engineers, it cannot be altogether avoided.

Music Mastering Software – Encoding and Presentation

An expert mastering studio can even include the Universal Product Code (UPC), a barcode which allows an item to be tracked over the United States and Canada during trades. Music mastering studios can also encode the International Standard Recording Code (ISRC), an internationally accepted code used especially for audio and music video recordings. Important additional info about the artist and the CD can also be incorporated into the disc, such as the track names and the artist’s profile.

Music Mastering Software – Error Assessment

Audio technicians check and double check any track that comes out of their studios. The pros pore over the audio for hours on end. Any imperfection that might be left due to negligence is unacceptable. Musicians who trust their precious records are assured that their home audio recordings are fit to be heard and ready for critics.

Digital audio books have rapidly gained in popularity over the last few years due to their convenience. In the past listening to audio books meant having to deal with multiple cassettes. Tapes were cumbersome and made it inconvenient to listen to a long story. Also cassette tapes could be troublesome due to the fact that they were so prone to damage from heat, etc. When CDs entered the picture they certainly changed the world of audio books for the better. However CDs were still cumbersome and inconvenient albeit less so than tapes.

What has truly revolutionized the audio book industry is downloadable digital audio books. You just can’t beat the convenience of a digital file for a good number of reasons. For one thing, you no longer have to worry about storing and caring for a bunch of cassettes and CDs. You certainly can’t scratch a digital file or break it! Now you can listen to your audio books anywhere you like with an iPod or other mp3 player. You can even listen on your PC or Mac if you like. And for listeners who occasionally require CDs (such as car stereos that don’t have an iPod input) digital audio books are the best of both worlds as they can be easily converted to a standard audio CD.

Nowadays you can find nearly every genre in audio format, from fiction to business to children’s books. And with publishers rapidly releasing both new titles and old classics you’re sure to find nearly all of the titles you would want.

Forget 99% of the articles out there that are telling you what you need for starting your very own internet based radio station. I’m here to let you know that you can cut your budget by almost 99% by not listening to most of the articles that exist on the web today.

I just has an article about my streaming radio station in the local paper and when the reporter ask how to start an internet radio station I was torn between a couple of answers. Do I lengthen the story and add a few thousand dollars to the budget just to scare away potential competition? Or do I tell the reporter just how easy is actually is, and deal with a few more station on the internet that could potentially steal listeners from me? I chose to tell the reporter exactly what I though was right. I chose to tell him exactly how easy setting up your very own radio station is.

When I started to research what it took to set up a streaming radio station, It was staggering how many articles are out there that told me that I needed thousands of dollars and a web hosting account that would cost an extra 400 to 500 hundred dollars a month to handle the bandwidth and copyrighting issues of running an internet radio station. I actually became quite angry after I had gone through most of the set up of my own station. I realised that a lot of the articles out there were written by people who just wanted to sound smart, simply copied and pasted another articles and had no clue what it took, and the creme de la creme were the people who wrote articles just to scare people out of creating a station because they couldn’t handle the competition. So, the number one item on the list of important things to do before you start you own streaming radio station? Research, and lots of it.

I quite literally have another window open on my screen as I write this because I want to list out what the author of the other article wants you to buy in order to start your own streaming station. Ready?  Here goes…

• 2 CD players
• Nero 9
• Adobe Audition for Editing
• 2 EV RE27N Mics (yeah, right)
• Audio mixing board
• Outboard audio gear (compressor, equalizer)
• Digital Audio Card
• Dedicated computer
• Encoding software
• Streaming media server

This list is why I get so frustrated. What you see in the list is about $3000.00 of wasted money.  This guy obviously wrote an article to either brag about what he knows about electronics, or to scare away people that want to get into running their own station. I know that if I didn’t know better, I would have added up the grocery list and immediately started thinking about getting into another line of work.

Do you want to know what you actually need to start your own streaming radio station? Here we go…the truth of what you need:

• Your computer
• Some music
• WinAmp
• Broadcast scheduling software with encoders
• Mic
• VPS Hosting account
• Patience and lots of it

Since you already own you computer we can say that you can now start your own station for about $200.00. Yes, it is a far cry from the estimated $3000.00 the other list was telling that you needed. Doesn’t it make you want to punch a wall?

We’ll start at the beginning of the list and explain what it means or how you can get it for cheap or free.

Let’s start with your computer.  As I already stated, you got one and shouldn’t be counted in the list.  If you need one, get a good one. I run one computer for my station and had an AMD Dual Core for about 2 years.  I never had a problem and it ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until the day I thought I would trade out the heat sink and cooling fan and destroyed the processor. Now I run an Intel Quad Core and it works just fine, although I am still partial to AMD, but it just gets down to familiarity and brand loyalty. You can buy a great computer these days for a small price. You can get a fast computer with a mouse and keyboard and a 20″ monitor for about $600.00 these days. This will honestly be the biggest purchase you will make, unless you start to get fancy that is.

Now let’s talk about the music. Your best friend will be either Indie music, Open Source, or Public Domain. You can have a rotation list of 1000’s of songs without ever having to touch today’s mainstream music. Why pay money every month and/or year when you can have all the best music in the world for free? You just have to do a bit of digging and emailing to get people to send you their music, but they are always glad to get exposure. When I first started, I used ‘free to post’ websites to let bands know I was looking for music submissions. I would get at least 20 emails from bands within the first 12 hours of the posting. This is great, especially with niche radio stations like opera, indie or dance music. THERE’S ALWAYS FREE MUSIC OUT THERE! Never steal music to put on your site, bands don’t respect it and you get boycotted PDQ.

WinAmp is free and it’s super easy to use as a media player and a broadcast unit. When you get to the site, just download the WinAmp broadcasting package and you’ll be set up and ready to go. WinAmp also transitions into using Shoutcast on your server, but we’ll talk about that later.  Either way, they are both FREE.

Broadcast scheduling software was the biggest pain in the butt to research.  There’s so much competition out there and a lot of crap to sift through before you hit the golden nuggets of scheduling software. The important thing to remember about this particular software is that you can get it for FREE! Do you see a theme starting here? To get you started, here is a list of FREE software you can use for broadcasting. It may not be the ultimate in broadcasting software, but it works and you might even like it…

• BP2X – Broadcast Power
• Zulu Radio
• WinAmp
• Shoutcast
• NCH Software

Try each of them out and figure out what you like the best. Eventually you may end up going with a paid copy of another piece of software, but FREE is good always, and it’s the best way to start.

If you plan on talking you need a mic. Mics do make a difference and people can tell that you are using a crappy microphone. But for the cost, stay with a low budget mic that you can upgrade easilty at a later date. Most start-up streaming stations don’t even have a DJ, so the mic might be just an afterthought. Buy what your budget can afford, any more than that and you’ve wasted your money.

The hosting account is very important. You need enough bandwidth to be able to broadcast to your listeners, but not too much that will break the bank. VPS hosting seems to be the way to go. VPS stands for Virtual Private Server and is pretty close to running your own private server.  The thing that I like is that you get tech support and you get to add programs to your hosting account like FFmpeg and Shoutcast/IceCast. The speed of the server is pretty good, and depending on the server, you are 1 of 4 (maybe 6) other clients on the same server. What you really need though is the ability to use telnet or communicate with your account via SSH to start your Shoutcast server, assuming you are using Shoutcast or Icecast. The hosting company I chose to go with after a bit of trial and error was WestHost. They’ve had their share of difficulties in the past, but the past is the past.  They offer support that is second to none and the prices are really good. But, shop around and see what’s best for you. And there’s a reason I didn’t mention your Internet Service Provider.  They can be a bit grouchy when you decide to use them as your means of stream a radio station. Upload bandwidth is usually topped out at 200 to 500 megs, which means you can only have a finite number of listeners.  ISP’s also have rules and regulations about broadcasting or streaming, so double check.  If they let you and you don’t need a lot of listeners, then you just dropped you price by another $150.00 or so.

So, we’ve learned that creating an internet station is not easy, but it’s not as hard as people would have you beleive. The expense is minimal, if you do it right. The random article I googled gave a price of abouit $3000.00.  I was able to give you the price of about $200.00 assuming you have a computer.  That’s a big difference.  Your best friends are going to be:

• Open Source
• Public Domain
• Independent Music

Just remember those phrases when you are looking up information on your search engine. If you play your cards right, you may eventually find that you can get things done for no price at all.

What is Internet Radio?

Much like traditional radio programming, internet radio is much the same. It is delivered to listeners via a continuous stream over the web. Users can access the programming on “stations”or websites that host either one individual show or many shows over varying topics. Internet radio is different from podcasting, in that users do not have to download the programming. The shows stream freely without a media device needed. Some online radio shows are connected or a part of a traditional radio network or show while others are independently owned and operated.

How can I Use it to Promote My Business?

By establishing programming on Internet radio that gets your brand and message out to consumers. Businesses that create programming that resembles talk radio can find a great deal of success through this medium. Programming can be established as a weekly, bi weekly or even monthly event for your company. You can feature experts or guests or you can have past or present customers talk about how they utilize and benefit from your products and services.

There are Internet radio stations that closely resemble social media outlets as well. Listeners are invited to interact with the hosts and participant of your radio program. This helps you to better guide your programming and better determine what the market would like to receive from you. The key to providing great programming could be as easy as using the content or scripting from an infomercial your company has had success with in the past.

One great benefit of broadcasting on popular internet radio stations is the large amount of traffic they receive. A savvy business owner knows that regardless of the format or content you chose to present, the most important thing you can do is direct people back to your website or business. This is where the real benefit of this medium come into play.