Production Facilities

Radio commercials will need to be produced in either a professional radio studio internally such as Capital and they will need all the resources and software needed to make it completely independently and to a high quality. They can also be outsourced from a production house by hiring their studio and you may even pay them to edit it for you, write scripts and even cast voice actors and provide many other services such as the company below:

Obviously you will also have to insure that either studio you use whether it’s a production house or the radio station you have the right equipment and software to achieve a high quality advert such as; high quality microphones (so the voice sounds the highest quality and there is no background noise to the recording) , soundproofed voice booth (to keep external sounds to a minimum and keep the internal sounds to a high quality), editing workstation and software (reaper, audacity for piecing the commercial together and starting to combine each aspect such as sound effects, voice, music and so forth and making sure the levels achieve are on balance and the volume of the commercial is fairly consistent). This company provides studios for the production of radio commercials:

Also when making the advertisement the studio will need to have a production music library to use for the advert to make the commercial more memorable and dynamic, you also have to ensure that there will be no copyright issues with the music used by ensuring the music played is royalty free our studio has a library of music that is completely copyright free as it was purchased and downloaded legally and is only used to within college grounds, here is the library:

Pre-recorded sound effects may also be needed in the studio used to achieve a high standard commercial so they will also need a library of them to make the advert more interesting and maybe even humorous. We have one in our studio too.

The editing software we use in college and have accsess to is audacity, reaper and audition to edit different projects to a proffessional level. We use them for the projects that involve audio usually; podcasts, radio work or interviews. Reaper is a digital audio workstation software: a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment. Reaper works with almost any hardware and can be used in combination with a vast universe of other software and plug-ins. When I created my jingles for last years radio work I used audactiy to edit the sound clips and voice.

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. The interface is translated into many languages. You can use Audacity to: Record live audio., Record computer playback on any Windows Vista or later machine, Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, Edit WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP2, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis sound files, AC3, M4A/M4R (AAC), WMA and other formats supported using optional libraries, Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together, Numerous effects including change the speed or pitch of a recording. I haven’t used this for my college work yet.

Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation from Adobe Systems featuring both a multitrack, non-destructive mix/edit environment and a destructive-approach waveform editing view. Adobe Audition has many different features such as:

- Sound Remover

- Enchanted Spectral Display

- Advanced Sound Design

- Preview Editor

- Round trip Editing Workflow

- Audio Finesse

- Enhanced Multitrack Editing

- ITU Loudness Metering

- Automatic Speech Alignment

I haven’t used this software yet either.