Broadband has finally brought multimedia to the web. With the increased focus on blogging and podcasting, all-new doors have opened up on the Internet. A few years ago, this author and some friends decided to create an online radio show about Open Source, called LUGRadio (www.lugradio.org). During the process of creating LUGRadio, a number of different skills and experiences slowly helped to create a better show. In this series, we’ll explore how to create your own radio show, covering both creative and technical issues.

Coming up with ideas
The first thing to decide is what your radio show will be about. Feel free to let your imagination run wild here. Your show isn’t bound by commercial radio limitations and can be about anything. This is the most difficult part in creating a show – you could create a technically perfect show, but it may well be boring. The best thing to do is create something that feels natural to you. If you have a natural affinity for a particular subject, why not make a noise about it?

Another important point is that your show is likely to be better if you have more than one person involved. Unless you’re creating an audio blog podcast, it’s recommended that you have at least two people behind the mics. This creates more opportunities for interesting discussion and chitchat. When you’ve decided on the format of the show, discuss with your co-presenters what kind of direction you want to have. Is the show going to be funny/serious/technical/dry, and so on? With these initial discussions out of the way, you’ll then be in a position to record your first episode and feel comfortable with the show.

Recording equipment
With the concept of your show considered, you now need to amass the equipment required to record it. You’ll first need to obtain microphones for each presenter/guest involved. You don’t need to worry too much about the quality of the microphones, but you should aim to secure your mics to microphone stands to reduce the sound of touching the mic itself. Another useful tip is to buy some pop-shields. These little additions sit on the microphone to stop words beginning with ‘p’ or ‘b’ causing a popping sound on your recording.

Another useful benefit is to purchase a small mixer. Each microphone will plug into the mixer, and you can use it to adjust the volume levels of each mic to cater for the different volumes of different people’s voices. In addition, even very low cost mixers include the ability the perform some initial sound shaping (called EQ) to adjust the levels of bass, treble and ‘mid’ in the frequency. Always try to get the quality of the sound as good as possible before you plug it into the PC. This way, you’ll have more flexibility when mixing it together later.

Choosing your software
You need to take the audio output from your mic(s) and put it into your computer, where you’ll do the recording. We’re not going to cover a specific piece of software in too much detail here, as you can use a variety of different tools to record and edit your show (see the ‘Choose a multitracker’ column). There are a number of free and commercial tools, but you’ll need to ensure the software has support for recording, wave editing, volume control and the ability to output to Ogg or MP3 formats.

When you’re choosing which software tool to use, you may also want to consider if there’s a software plug-in system available. As an example, the VST plug-in system in many commercial audio-editing tools can be very useful for applying effects that will genuinely increase the quality of your final production. These software tools are typically open and extensible, so that you can download/purchase additional plug-ins later and add them. We’ll discuss plug-ins more when we mix the show together next month.

Start recording
Whichever software multitracker you decide to use, the next step is to record some audio into your computer. This will typically involve creating a new project and creating a new track in that project. Select this, and when you start recording, the audio will be added to that track. When you’ve set this up, hit the main record button and record your audio segment. It’s probably a good idea to record your show in lots of different segments so it will be easier to edit them together without retreading old ground.

When you’ve recorded a number of segments together, the next step is to edit them into a continuous show. This will first involve you trimming the sound clips to remove unwanted audio at the start and end of each segment. You then need to obtain some music that you can use in between the clips. You can get a large catalogue of music that may be suitable for you to use at the Creative Commons website. You should trim the music so it’s the right length to fit between your segments.

Fading segments
When you come to edit your segments, you’ll probably want to have some vocal content and then play some music before the music fades and the next vocal segment comes in. You can do this by using the volume control in your software. As an example, in Cubase SX, you can use the volume curve to insert points and adjust where the volume moves up and down. This feature varies greatly between different software tools, but even the simplest tools have the ability to fade music in and out. You normally just select the segment to be faded and select the option in the menus to perform the fade.

Developing your show
In this article, we’ve covered many of the introductory concepts involved in choosing the right software, the right mics and how to get started creating your radio show. The technical side of creating your show is fairly straightforward, but the most difficult part is making it interesting enough and of high enough quality to listen to. In the next issue, we’ll continue to show you how to develop a show and discuss the best methods of improving the audio quality. We’ll also look at methods of getting your show into the hands of your listeners.