Audio Production Q&A

Your audio production questions answered in this podcast episode. Including how to say radio station frequencies, normalising audio, SHOUTcast players with Amazon affiliate links, making your voice sound good and media player buttons for internet radio stations.

Audio Production Questions

Thank you for listening to the Music Radio Creative podcast. I am so grateful for every email and question that is sent to me and I always do my best to take the time to reply or even feature your question on a future episode of the podcast.

How To Say Radio Frequencies

Kwame from Ghana contacted me to ask, “which is best, to say on radio; one zero two point one or one oh two point one.”

I chatted about this in detail on the podcast but to me it seems to be the difference between American and British pronunciations. I’d say one oh two point one. Sometimes, in US jingle packages the singers even miss out the point in radio station frequencies.

P.S. Don’t say ZED if you’re a British presenter on Z100!

Normalizing Audio

NOTE: I’ve used the US way of writing ‘normalising’ in the header of this question, “what level of db do you recommend for both dry and wet liners on radio.”

First, the difference between dry voice overs and wet voice overs. A dry voice over is just the voice with no music, sound fx or vocal fx included. Wet audio is generally considered to be the finished product mixed with vocal fx, filters and any audio production elements required.

If the audio is pre production I try to normalise to around -3dB, audio producer Al B. Love who I interviewed in episode 12 recommended this setting to me, as it gives you room to work in the multitrack and add plugins without distorting the original voice over. When the audio is mixed down and ready to play I normalise to 100% so that it sounds as loud as possible without any digital clipping.

SHOUTcast Player Skins with Amazon Affiliate Artwork Links

JD sent this email to me:

I’ve been searching the web to find an internet radio player that will work with shoutcast radio streams. My goal is to find one with cover art displayed for music currently playing. While I found one at RadioTuna, the player displays a “no cover art” message. I’m unable to figure out how to get it to display. Any clue what’s going on here? I’m able to display the art just fine using a shoutcheap script. However they have locked in a ridiculous 50x43px thumbnail size, and won’t consider changing it.  HELP!

I’m pleased to recommend a resource that I’ve found on Code Canyon called PHP-Javascript Shoutcast and Icecast Player which I find to be perfect, lightweight and you can put your Amazon Associates details into it and receive a commission payment each time a listener clicks the artwork and buys an mp3 track from Amazon.

How To Make Your Voice Sound Good

Patrick Cullen writes:

How do you get your voice to sound so good? I have seen your video on what you use etc. for V/O and believe me I tried, but still can’t get it sounding as good as yours. Any tips? Do you use any extra plugins? I am currently using the dbx 286s (same as you) and a Neumann TLM 103. Also, what if it’s going to be a pre recording for an FM station?

I show you many processes to make your voice sound better on the Music Radio Creative YouTube channel and talk about my microphone setup in detail in episode 3 and episode 15 but there is another process you can add again in the multitrack of Adobe Audition to make a podcast sound loud so that it comes across clearly when someone is listening in a noisy environment (like the car). Add some dynamics processing, a bit of EQ (I usually lift the treble on my voice to make it crisp and clear) and a bonus effect I reserve for radio sweepers is the reverb effect.

If you’re recording for FM radio stations I’d recommend that you don’t add too much to your voice as most FM compressors will take care of making your voice sound great!

Media Buttons Plugin for WordPress

Here’s an email from Dave in Ohio:

Following in your footsteps. I’m on listen2myradio, and I have my station, I can’t get the media buttons plugin to work. Can you take a screen shot of your settings and send it over?

Here’s my setup, very simple, just server name and port included (usually an IP address but I have mine as an A NAME redirect from stream.mrc.fm so that I own the listen live domain and not listen2myradio in case I ever need to switch or change servers).