planning and research stages

research and Planning
Due to lots of recording and helping ruhul with the technical side i have neglected my blog so i thought i would write a review summing up our research and planning.

As a group our task was produce a 5-8 minute News piece for radio, we had previously used the radio equipment during our preliminary task and so were used to the equipment such as the mike and knew the computer program: Audacity we were also lucky enough to have Audacity on ruhul's laptop which meant we could work from home aswell

For our initial research we listened too and analysed some established radio stations se we could see how they did it. we decided to do our analysis a little different to other groups as we chose a more diverse group of radio stations instead of all local and london stations. the radio stations we chose were Heart FM, Radio 1 and Bolton FM in this research we focused on the language used to influence our piece for example we didnt use slang in our news piece as during the news segments on these stations we used formal and direct language

some up of radio stations(check blog for more detail)

Heart is the local station for London but also goes national, this made it very interesting. It played popular music and has a memorable jingle ‘This is Heart’ which is a very recognisable jingle. The news segment was sharp and included all the top headlines, but also featured a section of local news to the capital. As a listener I enjoyed Heart and found it easy to listen too although locally I thought it could have been more in depth.

BBC Radio 1 is a national station and one I had listened too before. They play chart music and have celebrity presenters such as Chris Moyles, Veron Kay and Fearne Cotton. Although many of the presenters on Radio 1 are very good it became apparent that being a television celebrity does not make you natural at radio, and many would trail off with uninteresting tales of their own lives. The news section covered the main stories but the shows were generally centred around music and light hearted ‘banter’.

96.5 Bolton FM is the local station for Bolton in Lancashire. The initial sound sounded less professional then the previous two sections but understandably they’d have a cheaper recording system. This station was very local and the news consisted of information about the local market and what the people of Bolton were up too. We needed to learn from this for when we presented our local news section.


From this point on me alex and ruhul had a brain storm about our radio news segment. We targeted it to be around 4 – 6 minutes long and include both local and nation stories, also including weather and sports, possibly ending with a light hearted story. In our preliminary piece we had branded ourselves as a light hearted team; this was backed up by our name ‘The Coconut Lounge’, and through our presenting we joked around and gave each other silly nicknames. All though there was nothing wrong with this in the right context, we felt as news presenters our final piece needed to be more serious and constructive. We ditched the nicknames and decided upon our 1st basic timeline which was as followed:



Jingle -30 seconds

Headlines – 1 minute

Main Story – 2 minutes

Vox-Pop (weather) – 30 seconds

Sports – 1 minute

Light Story to end on (interview) – 1 minute

This basic plan gave us bones to work on so that we could build our piece. The idea behind this that we wanted to include as much as possible such as vox-pops and a jingle without overdoing it and rushing our show. We were definitely in the planning stage of our final piece.

We began to choose the news stories we wished to present.

Headlines were to be up to date and researched on the day as we didn’t need to practise talking about them, this was also to be true of weather, we would report on how it was at the time.

Our Main Story was to be the earthquake in Haiti and the aftermath of that.

Sports would include the John Terry affair and up to date scores.

The light hearted story would be a man with a large crocodile collection.

We chose real life stories because we wanted to relate to our audience and allow them to feel emotion for the news. We also chose the stories we did because they interested us and so any excitement or sorrow in our voices would be real and there for better. We began to script sections:

Alex: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died.
Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.

Liam: A "large number" of UN personnel were reported missing by the organisation. Many people have spent the night outside amid fears of more aftershocks

Once we had planned and scripted it all our Time Line changed and looked more like this:

Jingle 20-30 seconds
News headlines 20-30 seconds
Main story in depth 1 minute
Vox pop 30 seconds to be carried out on location
Funny news stories 20-30 seconds
Football news 20-30 seconds
Weather 20-30 seconds
Local weather
Vox pop 30 seconds on location
Jingle 20-30 seconds
This change showed our piece was progressing all the time and we knew we were moving forwards.

news stories

Main News Story:
Earthquake in Hati
‘A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake has struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti.
The extent of the devastation is still unclear but there are fears thousands of people may have died.
Haiti's worst quake in two centuries hit south of the capital Port-au-Prince on Tuesday, wrecking the presidential palace, UN HQ and other buildings.
A "large number" of UN personnel were reported missing by the organisation. Many people have spent the night outside amid fears of more aftershocks.
The Red Cross says up to three million people have been affected.
Describing the earthquake as a "catastrophe", Haiti's envoy to the US said the cost of the damage could run into billions.
A number of nations, including the US, UK and Venezuela, are gearing up to send aid.’

Sports Story:
John Terry Affair + Football Scores

England boss Fabio Capello will name defenders Wayne Bridge and John Terry in the squad for the friendly against Egypt on 3 March. Terry is alleged to have had an affair with Bridge's former partner but Capello has warned both defenders not to bring any personal tensions with them.

Up to date scores at the time if recording

Weather:

Up to date at the time of recording

Light-Hearted Story:

Man tries to make Britain’s largest crocodile collection
-possible interview

problems faced this past week

we faced 3 main problems when recording this week
the first was the lack of recording time we had as we share the room with the other 2groups.
the second was illness as ruhul came down with tonsilitious which meant we couldnt record his vox pops or his various other segments.
the final problem was conflicting schedules as when one of us had a free others would be in lesson vise versa which has caused a few problems.

update 2

updated time plan 5 mins estimate time recored 2 minutes 12 seconds so far.

jingle 20-30 seconds RECORDED
news headlines 20-30 RECORDED seconds to be read by me and alex
main story in depth RECORDED 1 minute to be read by alex
vox pop 30 seconds to be carried out on location by ruhul
funny news stories 20-30 seconds to be read by me
football news RECORDED 20-30 seconds to be read by me
weather 20-30 RECORDED read by alex
local weather read by ruhul
vox pop 30 seconds RECORDED on location read by ruhul
jingle 20-30 seconds RECORDED

Radio update and audacity

I thought this would be a good time to give an update and abit of an analysis of the software we are using. Firstly in our last couple of lessons we have managed to record our national headlines,the main story(minus vox pop due to illness) and the sports section and all together we have roughly 2 minutes of our broadcast done still left to do is vox pops, weather and local headlines. i am confident we can get all these aspects of the show recorded and edited by our deadline.

Audacity:

Audacity is a free software, cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD.
Audacity was created by Dominic Mazzoni while he was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.
Mazzoni now works at Google, but is still the main developer and maintainer of Audacity, with help from many others around the world.
The latest release of Audacity is 1.3.12, a beta, released on 1 April 2010.[8] As of 29 October 2010, it was the 10th most popular download from SourceForge.net, with 72 million downloads. Audacity won the SourceForge.net 2007 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.

features of audacity:

• Importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis, all file formats supported by libsndfile library
  
• Versions 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 and later also support Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)[11]
  
• Version 1.3.6 and later also support additional formats such as WMA, AAC, AMR and AC3 via the optional FFmpeg library
  
• Recording and playing sounds
  
• Editing via Cut, Copy and Paste (with unlimited Undo)
  
• Multitrack mixing
  
• A large array of digital effects and plug-ins. Additional effects can be written with Nyquist
  
• Amplitude envelope editing
  
• Noise removal
  
• Audio spectrum analysis using the Fourier transformation algorithm
• The ability to make precise adjustments to the audio's speed while maintaining pitch (Audacity calls it changing tempo), in order to synchronize it with video, run for the right length of time, etc
• The ability to change the audio's pitch without changing the speed
  
• Contains major features of modern multi-track audio software[12] including navigation controls, zoom and single track edit, project pane and XY project navigation, non-destructive and destructive effect processing, audio file manipulation (cut, copy, paste)
  
• Converting cassette tapes or records into digital tracks by automatically splitting one track into multiple tracks based on silences in the track and the export multiple option
  
• Multi-platform: works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix-like systems (including Linux and BSD), among others
  
• The latest stable version supports Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista, but Windows 95 and NT are not supported. Windows 7 support is still provisional. For Windows 7, the developers recommend the latest 1.3.x Beta[13]
  
• Audacity uses the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems.
  
• Audacity can also be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts. It can be used for finishing podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out.
  

It is currently used in the OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.

Despite its positives i have discovered 3 weeknesses:

• Audacity lacks dynamic equalizer controls, real time effects and support for scrubbing
  
• A plug-in is required for VST plug-ins in Audacity 1.2.x
  
• MIDI files can only be displayed

Here are some reviews from users these were found on http://www.snapfiles.com/

Interface: 5 Features: 5 Ease of use: 5 Value: 5 Overall: 5 out of 5
Amazingly powerful audio file editor. ... Supports input/output of WAV, Ogg, FLAC, MP3, MP2, AC3 and about a dozen others, plus allows writing audio tags with each file. ... Excellent list of plug-ins and filters. Very powerful, easy-to-use, supports virtually unlimited number of tracks. The best audio editor I've seen, not that I've seen every single piece of software in existence, but this is awfully hard to beat !

Interface: 1 Features: 3 Ease of use: 1 Value: 5 Overall: 2 out of 5
I know by far this is a good program, but lacks too much on help and guidance. Sound issues are not easy, and the programs doesn't helps too mucho. I.E.: after installing, no sound recording device were detected. No info on website, confusing info in forums, confusing screen captures (using same version!) menus just disappear (apart from the old looking GUI) It would be nice to have some contextual help and recommendations, i.e. frequency rate? how do I know which settings are good for the job I'm doing? (some hours googling it...)Some other issues, wav files does not behave like normal wav files. A lot of good intentions, there's a lot of people enjoying this program, but any time I use it, I have a lot of troubles. You may need a PhD in Audacity... I do not get the point.

Interface: 3 Features: 4 Ease of use: 3 Value: 5 Overall: 4 out 5
Although it's not listed as working under Vista, it has performed very well on my Compaq while editing very large mp3 files. I tried other editing software, some were shareware with free trial time, and their asking prices were from $29 to $99 and they did not perform as well as Audacity! Thank you for such a great program!

These range of reviews led me to decide to write my own review on the website:

Interface: 4 Features: 4 Ease of use: 4 Value: 5 Overall:4.5 out of 5
Have been using this for a while without too many problems. It does have limitations when playing back edited portions of music in that it plays such a small section of your changes you don't get a feel for how the changes will come out. Thank goodness for the undo function. I still use this as a main tool for editing wav files, In particular the editing of wave files taken from records. I have found it useful for this due to the click removal tool which is quite effective. For a free program this is a nice piece of software. I would highly recommend this to anyone who needs to do some wave editing and converting.