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Pinocchio in Surround Sound

2012-12-17T13:46:42+00:00

Editor’s note: Pinocchio was broadcast as Radio 4's Saturday Drama on Saturday 15 December. The programme is available on iPlayer Radio and is also being offered for download in a surround sound format. Here, Simon Tuff, Principal Technologist for BBC Audio and Music Technology Team explains the different file formats available. PM

Audio innovation is a passion for BBC Research and Development and on occasion programmes are offered to listeners in new formats in order for us to gauge interest and accessibility to these new formats. This month we are offering the latest Radio 4 Saturday Drama, Pinocchio in two download formats.

Remember you can listen to Pinocchio in the regular way via iPlayer Radio - but read on if you are interested in this Surround Sound experiment.

This latest dramatisation of Pinocchio was produced by the BBC Salford team in conjunction with BBC Research and Development, using the latest form of audio production technique based on “audio objects”. Tony Churnside explains how this is done on the Research and Development blog. To demonstrate how well this production technique works we have created 2 different (5.1) surround sound versions and made them available here.

The first version is in Dolby Digital or Dolby AC3 as it’s often called. It’s the same format that is used for DVDs and the HDTV sound on FreeSat and BSkyB. The idea with this version is to burn a copy to a DVD (with a suitable authoring tool) and then play it on your home cinema system. You can find out more about Dolby digital from their website. This version will also play in the vlc media player on a Mac or PC. You can get information about vlc here.

Download Version One: Dolby AC3

The second version uses a format called MPEG Surround and requires a suitable media player such Winamp. The latest freeware version (V 5.63) of Winamp should work on Windows 7 PC with a 5.1 sound card.

To configure Winamp, select the surround sound settings (System Settings -> Sound -> Device Settings -> 5.1 Speaker Setting), load the .mp4 sound file and if you have 6 correctly located speakers you should get surround sound.

If not then this file is cleverly constructed so that a standard AAC compatible media player will play the drama in stereo.

Although we tried these files with the vlc & Winamp players other suitable players may well be available so if you find something else that works well please let us know by posting a comment below.

Download Version Two: MPEG Surround

We hope you enjoy Pinocchio in surround sound, as we think it really enhances the experience, but please remember that this is still experimental and thus may not work perfectly, however we are keen to know what you think so please let us know how you got on and what you made of our surround sound drama by posting your thoughts on the Radio 4 blog below.

If you want to download the standard MP3 of Pinocchio then it will be available from the Drama of the Week download page from 21 December 2012 for 7 days.

In defence of trails

2010-08-06T12:55:00+00:00

Editor's note: this week's item from Feedback, Radio 4's weekly accountability programme, concerns the highly contentious issue of trails. Putting his head in the lion's mouth to defend them is network manager, Denis Nowlan. Brave man - SB

What is it about trails that so excites or rather inflames the Feedback listener? This week as I entered the office I could feel the heat radiating off the incandescent emails.

The immediate cause was an interview I did last week with the deputy Editor of the Today programme, Jon Zilkha. A few days before, a BBC weather forecaster had had to cut his pre-8 a.m. bulletin from its standard 90 seconds length to a truncated 20 seconds. The reason was that a live discussion about the BBC itself had overrun, in listeners' view an increasingly common occurrence.

Of course another option would have been to drop the trail instead. Mr Zilkha defended the decision to cut the forecast and went on to suggest that for many listeners trails are just as important as the weather. Many of our correspondents were incredulous about that assertion.

"If he can actually find a listener who would rather listen to a trailer then hear a weather forecast, I"ll buy him a drink" wrote Colin Williams.

Deborah Bull told us "You are a public service and a decent weather forecast is part of that. There is no justification for preferring to run trails instead".

Peter Simpkin said "I hope you will follow up with a direct question to the Controller R4... is the 5-to-8 trailer more important than the weather by higher command?"

Well the Controller was not available but the official defender of trails was. He is the Network Manager of Radio 4, Denis Nowlan. Listen to his defence of trails and tell us what you think in a comment:

By the way the latest RAJAR figures show that Radio 4 has just had its best listening figures ever, and that those for Radio 3 have gone down a little. I think there must have been a General Election.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

Listen again to the whole programme, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
On the About the BBC blog, Margo Swadley writes about those RAJAR figures

Making podcasting more enticing

2010-05-07T16:05:41+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/

At BBC Radio we are pretty proud of our success with podcasting. Around 10 million editions of BBC podcasts are downloaded each month in the UK - Around 20 million across the whole world. The numbers are impressive.

However I often wonder whether we could do much better than that. "Ask not how many podcasts there have been but how many more there could be."

Listeners often tell us they would like to be able to save programmes and hear them when it suits them and being able to take programmes with you on an MP3 player or mobile phone is also attractive. On the other hand people also tell me that podcasting seems very complicated. It feels rather geeky or indeed expensive. So we commissioned some research and are going to experiment with some new ways of describing what I think is a really terrific offer.

Our first go is the new trail for A History of the World which John Humphrys has recorded. We worked hard to try to make the whole business enticing and simple and John is one of the least geeky people around:

A History of the World has proved hugely popular with over 3.4 Million editions downloaded so far. It is unique in that we can offer the full series of podcasts forever. You can listen or download them from the A History of the World web site.

So if you think there are things we can do to make podcasting feel easier or make it more attractive do let us know. Words like 'subscribe' ("sounds like something you have to pay for") or 'download' ("I don't like clogging up my computer") are particularly unpopular. We will try to do better.

Meanwhile A History of the World is back on May 17th for 8 weeks or 40 more podcasts.

Andrew Caspari is Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive

There are currently 262 BBC podcasts. Learn about them and subscribe here.
Give us your own suggestions for how to sell podcasts to the millions of people who haven't tried them yet - snappy catchphrases or clever communication ideas - in a comment below.