By Roadkill Creative
If you’ve been at production for more than a few weeks, you’ve probably noticed the most time consuming task in the studio (or at your desk with Adobe Audition or Pro Tools) isn’t putting the pieces together for a great promo — it’s taking the time to find the pieces to produce that great promo.
A few years ago, I remember my PD coming into my studio asking me to cook up a promo that featured some caller audio. I had the voice tracks from the voice guy, picked out some music and effects for the promo, but I was at a loss for having just the right mix of callers to pull it off. What’s next? The daunting task of blindly listening to old talk shows for the just the right byte from a caller. There has to be a better way, right? Yes, there is and here are two suggestions.
1 – If you’re lucky enough to have a local talk show, ask your engineer if they can set up a “phone only” feed from the talk studio. No annoying talk show host to step over the caller or music to make the call unusable…just the caller. If you’re able to set this up in a logger, aircheck machine, or even a DRR in NexGen to automatically record this audio, you’re golden. At the end of the day, pop open your DAW, look for the pieces in the waveform that are not silence, and go fishing for some callers.
2 – Now let’s say you don’t have a local show at your station or you’re not able to get the “phone only” feed from engineering, there is another option. Listen while you work. No, I’m not talking about some trite positioning statement from the AC station across town. While you’re producing spots, writing copy, or working on the next Mercury Award winner, listen to your station. If you want to be hi-tech, create a task in Outlook with the day’s date and give it a title of something like “Promo Notes”. Yes, you can be old-school and write it down on a piece of paper. But if you’re like me, you can be left with scraps of meaningless notes at the end of the week if left unchecked. When you hear an audial gem, write down the time and a description of what you heard (this works for clips from local and syndicated talk show hosts too). When it’s time to produce your next promo or when you just want to switch things up a little, go fishing for some great caller or talk show clips…and know where the fish are.
Good news for all aircheck fans! The aircheck links in the right column have been updated and now feature even more sites where you can listen to great radio and download airchecks from. Enjoy!
A few more years and every station has to live with the reality of PPM, the Portable People Meter of Arbitron. Obviously the system has lots of advantages in comparison to the traditional way of acquiring radio ratings. But more and more radio veterans seem to question PPM's accuracy because listenership reports have frequently been quite different from those of the old diary system.
Dr. Barry Blesser, Director of Engineering, 25-Seven Systems, Inc. published a study August 18th. examining the reliability of the PPM system. He concludes "that this system appears to be technically sophisticated and well conceived; it can be expected to be extremely reliable when tested under "typical" conditions."
However, a more careful analysis by him suggested that "there may be real-world scenarios that dramatically degrade PPM performance." So there are situations where the station may not be recognized adequately because of different reasons. Let's take a look at what could hurt the reliability of PPM's hearing.
PPM Watermark
"The PPM system is just one example of "watermarking" technology, which has been subject to extensive research for the past two decades," explains Dr. Barry Blesser. "The Arbitron PPM system embeds watermarks with station identification codes into the audio program at the time of broadcast using an encoder in each individual radio station's transmission chain. Portable PPM decoders then identify which stations the wearers of these "people meters" are listening to."
So how strong should the watermark be in comparison to the audio signal? Blesser's study points out that "in order to embed the digital bits that make up the identification code, watermarking modifies the original audio by adding new content or changing existing audio components. The goal of an ideal audio watermarking system is to be 100% reliable in terms of embedding and extracting the watermarking data in all "typical" listener scenarios while remaining 100% inaudible for all "typical" program material."
Blesser explains that "these goals underscore a paradox: 100% encoding reliability requires audible watermarks. Conversely, to achieve total inaudibility, watermarks cannot be present on some material, which sacrifices reliability. Anecdotal reports from radio broadcasters say that Arbitron lowered the watermarking energy in response to complaints about the watermarking being audible in certain circumstances. Trade offs must always be made in audio watermarking systems to balance audibility and reliability."
Listening Environment
But how about the environment that the station is listened to? You can imagine when a radio is being listened to in a factory with lots of noises of heavy equipment or in any other situation with lots aof background noise, the 'hearing' of the PPM could get disturbed.
Barry Blesser says his examination of the PPM system is purely speculative, based on patent disclosures and anecdotal reports distributed in radio industry trade publications. Nevertheless he agrees that certain listening environments could give distorted PPM data. As he states "my best guesses at the scenarios most likely to fail are:
1. Audio program material with low-level high-frequency content, implying low-level watermarking tones.
2. Listening in a noisy environment or with the monitor positioned to receive only a muffled signal, increasing the likelihood that the PPM monitor will not correctly detect the stations' ID."
Listening unwillingly
Ofcourse there's also the possibility that you're listening to a station unwillingly. For example you're in a store or in a cab and you're 'forced' to listen to the station playing there. How reliable is that data? In his study Blesser concludes "that there will be some cases where the PPM system fails simply because the program content and listener environment do not match the assumptions made by the designers of the PPM system."
What can your station do?
Ofcourse you want your station's ratings to be the best, so when working with PPM what can you do to besides the content to enhance the results?
You can forget about gaming the system says Blesser: "A radio station has no direct way of modifying how portable decoders behave, nor should it. Gaming the system at the listening end would be no different from stuffing the ballot box or falsifying paper diaries. It is in the industry's best interest that a firewall be maintained between stations and individual participants in the audience measuring process."
"Nevertheless, insuring that audio leaving the station is optimized for successful PPM encoding is every station's business. A program director who understands which audio makes the PPM system more reliable has an advantage over a competitor who does not. Knowledge that is not public has high monetary value, not unlike that used for insider trading in the stock market."
So test your station!
Finally Blesser gives a few pointers on how your radio station can test its programming as well as explore the listening assumptions in the world of PPM. There are two basic approaches to evaluating your environment he tells.
"First, the input to the PPM encoder can be subtracted from the output of the encoder to create a "mix-minus" of the encoding. The subtraction removes most of the original program and allows the channels to be seen clearly with a spectrogram analysis of the difference. This will indicate which channels are being used to encode data and measure the total power in the watermarking information. Given this measurement technique, every program can be evaluated for its watermarking robustness, showing the ability of the PPM system to carry watermarking information on specific audio samples without examining the encoding itself."
"Moreover, the Arbitron decode confidence monitor provides an output that indicates if watermarking decoding was successful. If the encoding process is marginal because of weak channel encoding, then it may take longer for the decoder to find the embedded data, if it finds it at all. A long response time to acquire the station ID watermark serves as a warning that a non-ideal listening environment may result in a failure to detect the ID."
"Second, the Arbitron confidence decoder monitor can be placed in a listening setting deemed by the station as typical of its real-world listeners. For a drive-time talk show, the environment might be a truck or automobile with the windows rolled down. For a late-night show, it might be a bedroom. The microphone used by the decoder device as its input source may be at some distance from a radio loudspeaker and there may be "environmental" obstacles, such as a chair blocking the high-frequency channels but not the low frequencies. Effectively, one can determine the required signal-to-noise ratio in the listening environment for successfully decoding a specific received program for that program's target audience."
Important to keep in mind says Blesser is that "there is no evidence that the performance of a station's confidence decoder monitor is the same as that of the portable PPM carried by listeners. The confidence monitor is fed by a direct-wired connection, has a large power budget, and is seemingly without constraints on the computational power dedicated to decoding. In contrast, the portable decoder may have severe constraints related to power consumption, volume, and computational capabilities. On the other hand, the portable version may have front-end analog processing and filtering to optimize the extraction of the acoustic signal. Obviously, the portable device is a better test vehicle since it mimics the real world."
You can download the original study
here!
