I recorded 'Men, Martians and Machines' at BBC 7 on Tuesday 24th June 2003. It's a three hour programme that traces the history of Earthsearch, with generous chunks of my earlier radio plays, including one that I'd never heard.
BBC 7 is like a self-contained ILR station within Broadcasting House. They've got their own small production studio with a producer's box and a hot seat box. For recording, the producer plugs a SCSI drive into a networked system and records straight onto the hard disk at 44k/16bit using software very similar to CoolEdit to produce a monster .WAV file. Editing is a doddle. For each fluff, all I had to do was leave a pause so that the .WAV file would flatline, and read the paragraph again. Even so, it was a nerve-wracking yet enjoyable two-hours. For belt and braces reasons, a DAT recording is also made.
All BBC 7's programmes for each day are transferred onto a stack of SCSI hard disks and the whole output is controlled from a work station with a giant plasma screen showing a database so that everyone in the office can see what is going out at the moment. It runs under Windows! BBC 7 are in the process of building up their own CD archive library.
In view of BBC7's propensity to fall over now and then, usually at night when no one is around, I represented the item in pic to the controller. Actually, it's a decent toolkit from Lidls.
[Thanks to James, David Williams]
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