heh “just like tape”

[solarbird]

jeff Bohnhoff found this AVID ProTools parody site that’s pretty funny if you’re into recording technologies. Yeah, that’s pretty obscure, but it’s a Thursday and I have the annual multi-hour tax appointment so that’s all I got.

The real point of these is, yes, fine, there’s a tape aesthetic, there’s a sound, there are Happy Accidents, but jfc tape was awful when you actually had to use it. Or was fantastic, depending upon how you feel about editing with cutting blocks, tape hiss, capstan rumble, track bleed, dropouts, head lubricant which is not in any way as fun as it sounds and unbelievable amounts of expense, and don’t get me wrong, it beat everything that came before, this is really just my way of saying nostalgia is stupid, but if you want to use magnetic tape and gear as an effects box, that makes sense.

Just, gods, don’t have to rely on it.

I kind’ve wish they’d included some radio specific bits. There would’ve been commentary about randomised tape stretch in your carts, and there would be emulation of the magnetic track marker tape disappearing somewhere in the machine resulting in guaranteed loss of cueing functionality and 50%-likely loss of tape until you restored the track marker, plus a bonus .01% chance of Avid Virtual Cart Machine™ failure and .001% chance of Avid Virtual Cart Machine Electrical Fire™. Avid Virtual Tape Splicing Kit™ and Avid Virtual Cart Start Marker Kit™ subscription would both be required; Avid Virtual Staff Technician™ and Avid Virtual Little Fire Extinguisher Under The On-Air Desk™ recommended. Avid Virtual Cart Start Marker Kit™ and Avid Virtual Little Fire Extinguisher Under The On-Air Desk™ would be, of course, not yet available.

But you get the idea.

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Comments

[vatine]

"Thankfully", when I was doing radio, we were completely live, so all our mistakes were unrecoverable and no editing needed. Quite what made me think that 1h (well, 2h for about 6 months and the occasional 3h or 4h show) of weekly improv comedy across radio was a good idea I really do not understand.

[solarbird]

Well, carts were for spots, right - 30 seconds, 15 seconds, much less often 45-60 seconds. The rest was live. But there were lots of little spots like that.

[vatine]

Oh. Hm. Yeeees... I think we had a second Tandberg (one Tandberg was recording outgoing feed to the transmission tower(s), for reference purposes) for those and simply had some poor sod pre-editing those. I spent most of my time in the soundproof booth and only a small amount actually fiddling controls.

Yes, actually, when it was "commercial time", it was "station name and frequencies, start Tandberg 2, let it run until the ads were over, stop Tandberg 2" and it had enough tape for I think about a day's worth of ads. We were not a very profit-making radio station...

[solarbird]

I worked at two stations; one very highly rated and well off (WVLK, still in operation) and one... not. (WTLX, college station, gone now.) Neither did the engineer/DJ separation thing which became so standard later, tho'. both did it for things like interviews and sports. (And I played both sides of that desk, as, really, we all did.)

But yeah, at VLK, we could stack as many as six carts in the multicart machine, and they'd just go chunk-chunk-chunk through. We'd still be busy doing Whatever Was Next tho'. Only later did you get things like pre-recording your entire show in an hour and doing production work the rest of the day. That really happened later, with digital, in the late 90s and early 2000s. I'm told I got out just when it stopped being fun.