[CMA_Radioforum] Logging

[Steve Perry]

Yesterday at the Access Radio forum I mentioned a bit of software useful
for logging. It's $24.95 So somewhere around £15-20. You may feel a bit
nervous about buying stuff over the internet but I sent them my card
details and so far I haven't noticed any airlines tickets or holidays
being booked on it by someone else! 
The software is called Cybercorder (http://skyhawktech.com.) You can get
it cheaper if you are a charity. Most bespoke radio loggers cost around
2 to 5 grand. (If you have got that kind of dosh the I would recommend
the DOS version of Tracker by RCS. I'm not saying that the Windows 2000
version isn't any good it is just that we haven't tried it and the DOS
version was rock solid.)
We have used Cybercorder for around 10 months now for logging our
Satellite service and it's been reliable. I would recommend running on
Windows 2000 or XP or NT 4. (i.e. not Windows 98. I wouldn't try to run
anything mission critical on Windows 98.) It's certainly more reliable
(and convenient) than videotape.
You can select what file format to use. We use MP3 with a fairly low
quality (11,025kHz, 16kBits/second)  in mono which gives us just enough
quality to work out what exactly what is being said. Most professional
loggers work at that kind of quality as the Radio Authority's main
concern is they can work out what is being said (or sung) rather than
the quality of the music that you play. We get the 42 days of logging on
around 9Gb of space. You would easily do it at a low bit rate on a 15G
drive (taking into account that you will need space for the operating
system.)
If you have enough disk space you can select a higher bit rate (better
quality) and that would give you the bonus of being able to use the
audio for other purposes such as websites promotional cassettes etc. 
You can change the length of the files that you record e.g. one file per
hour, one file per show, one per day. It's really flexible. 

There was a slight bug in the original version that made it look as
though each hour was a few seconds short although in fact it wasn't when
you listen to it. I believe this has been fixed in the latest version
because it records the time each recording started and stopped rather
than the length of the file. 

The one thing that it doesn't do is play back the file that is currently
being recorded. I think the last time I tried that it crashed. Although
that's a rare occurrence it's probably better to record in hour blocks
for that reason. 

There's a demo that you can download. So try it out.

Steve Perry 
Cross Rhythms