Part of the process of producing a radio program is delivering the program to the station.  Years ago when I was at a station, most programs came to us on tape, usually by mail or parcel service and sometimes hand-delivered by the producers.  Network programs came via dedicated telephone lines.  I watched the advent of satelite delivery of programming to small market stations.  Today I deliver my audio files over the Internet.

Yesterday, though, I encountered a problem.  I had saved my files as CD-quality audio “wav” files.  For some reason, since the upgrade to Windows XP the audio software I use has lost the capability of saving in “mp3″ format, which is what I was sending in the past.  The audio quality of the mp3 is considerably poorer than that of the wav file; however, the file size is also much smaller.  I had not realized just how much smaller until yesterday, when my e-mail program balked at handling even one attached two-and-a-half minute file because of the size, and then my ftp program took several hours to upload the four programs, ten minutes of audio information, to store on my web site for the station to download.  I trust they will be able to download it more swiftly, as I am using a dial-up account and they have the capacity for streaming audio.  However, I am going to have to examine lower-quality files.  After all, there’s no music in the program, and my voice quality does not have to be that good.

I’ve completed a few other scripts for the show, but the seventh column is proving to have too much in it to make a single week’s program.  I’m contemplating how to split it, and whether to combine part of it with the eighth column, which is on a related subject (the one on magic and the other on religion), but I haven’t really given up hope of paring it to fit yet.  Part of my concern is that once I’ve done it once, I’ll be more likely to do it for future columns, and I would rather maintain the one article to one column relationship as much as possible–particularly since it is uncommon for the successive columns to be so closely related as this.  But I might have to succumb.

–M. J. Young