What format/media type for music?

Please excuse my ignorance about this. I don't work in the broadcast business, but I've been curious about this.

What is the most common source media/format type for the major music stations? I know on some smaller stations I hear talk about playing CDs and I can tell some play LPs sometimes (can hear the clicks and pops).

But I've been wondering what the larger stations use. For the most part the audio seems really good, although I can tell there are differences with things like automatic level gain and compression between stations. Just wondering if the source audio tends to be from CDs or some other higher bit rate digital format.

There's one small station here in Denver that seems like they use low bit rate MP3s and I have a hard time listening to it, but they're the exception.

Thanks!

MP2 was the standard for years for music on hard drive, with various levels of compression. I know some of the bigger MOHD software companies used it (BE's Audiovault, Arrakis, etc.). But that was during the turn of the century.

With the way that businesses sometimes tend to watch their budgets, I wouldn't be surprised if some stations are still using MP2 or MP3.

The fact stations are going to WAV is refreshing to hear. MP2 didn't sound bad necessarily, but to me, a music station always sounded better if the music was from a higher resolution source....

Thanks for the explanation. Makes complete sense. I'm glad compression isn't being used much. The typical listener in a car might not be able to tell, but there are still a few of us out here who listen at home with equipment where you can tell the difference.

So I'm guessing the RDS song info just comes from the song tags in the file?

DavidEduardo said:

The reason for that was the high cost of disk storage. A typical wav is in the 50mb range, so you get roughly 20 per gb.

In 1992 I bought a 200mb drive at a computer fair for $400.

Around 1996, I put two SCSI 10 gb drives in my home system, and each was around $400. Each would hold 35 to 40 wave files.

A few weeks ago, I added two 10tb drives to my system, and each was $400. 10tb will hold nearly 20,000 song in wav format.

There is no reason to compress now. 2tb SATA drives are under $100, so you can load up a digital storage system and do a redundant RAID array for literally pennies per song.

And there is a move to SSDs, as they have come down to around $400 per tb, which is pretty economical, even if you get pairs of them for RAID 1.

Click to expand...

I'm aware of that... I remember the size of those early SCSI drives, also.

By the middle of the last decade (around 2006) we were loading entire libraries onto very slim, small SCSI drives, which were much smaller in size and lighter than the early ones, and if memory serves, they also held more music. I don't know what the cost was. I'm certain the speed of access was different early on and later also, although maybe not by much.

When the company I worked for started shipping MOHD around 1996 (?) or so, the drives were massive, the size of bricks. Even in the early 2000's a terabyte was a large boxy structure in a room. Technology has obviously vastly improved.

This is a trip down memory lane, man....

In '94 I had an opportunity to work with the first 9Gb SCSI drive. We got a pre-production sample and put it into burn-in where it died in about 10 hours. That prompted the manufacturer to shut down production for a redesign. It turned out to be one of the most bulletproof drives ever made.

DavidEduardo said:

The reason for that was the high cost of disk storage. A typical wav is in the 50mb range, so you get roughly 20 per gb.

In 1992 I bought a 200mb drive at a computer fair for $400.

Around 1996, I put two SCSI 10 gb drives in my home system, and each was around $400. Each would hold 35 to 40 wave files.

Click to expand...

David, stick to programming. Math ain't your strong suit. If 20 wavs fit into 1Gb, 200 would fit into 10 - not 35 or 40. Unless you were sampling at 192kHz.

FM_Listener said:

So I'm guessing the RDS song info just comes from the song tags in the file?

Click to expand...

Exactly.

Hard drive storage is relatively inexpensive nowadays. Another file format that is lossless is flac. The clicks and pops you hear that may have been uncleaned vinyl dubs from the 1980s perhaps. I know TM Century at one time did vinyl dubs.

eriedj said:

Hard drive storage is relatively inexpensive nowadays. Another file format that is lossless is flac. The clicks and pops you hear that may have been uncleaned vinyl dubs from the 1980s perhaps. I know TM Century at one time did vinyl dubs.

Click to expand...

Their gold disk category had them for a while, and even the hit disks had a few early on, before CD service from record companies was standard... Then they would reservice them from an original CD source. This was in the very early 1990's.

Where I worked we sometimes used vinyl, and if the records were very bad you'd put water on the track and it would sometimes quiet a noisy record down... That and the pop filter on the rack would often do the trick. Whatever they couldn't take out, the razorblade would have to be used to remove it from the tape.

Vinyl, record, CD, tape, DAT -- all ancient tech now.

Broadcast companies mainly air LP versions these days so any single versions from vinyl are non-existent. I doubt music directors are in a production room recreating single versions prior to CD singles from the 80s or 90s. Guessing the listeners don't care.

Me, as a completist, prefer single versions and radio edits for my own personal library. But, I'm a rare breed. LOL. I've often recreated short versions digitally, if possible. Otherwise, I've dubbed vinyl and cleaned them up with ClickRepair and Adobe Audition.

Century21 / TM Century transitioned to production master tapes sent by the labels, whenever possible, for the HitDosc and GoldDisc products. Of course they discontinued the GoldDisc libraries a couple of years back.

R

DavidEduardo said:

I programmed one of the HitDisk categories for a number of years in the mid to late 90's and at that time we used CDs exclusively as source material as tape was not available for most product and took too long to get.

Click to expand...

Sure in the later years of the products, but for a lot of cuts in their library formats it was a different situation. I forget at the moment what the technology used was called, but it came to them from the labels in a digital format on Betamax video tapes. These were the same tapes being sent to the CD manufacturing plants for getting the music onto CD for consumers.

R

Robert Bass said:

Sure in the later years of the products, but for a lot of cuts in their library formats it was a different situation. I forget at the moment what the technology used was called, but it came to them from the labels in a digital format on Betamax video tapes. These were the same tapes being sent to the CD manufacturing plants for getting the music onto CD for consumers.

R

Click to expand...

Sony PCM 1630 and U-Matic Video Tape...

R