Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Recording Your Live Sets

Recording your shows is more than just accumulating material for a CD or whatever as there is much to be learned in listening to your own sets.  It takes a bit of discipline as probably no-one wants to do it all that much but it can help get your set dialed up even better than it is already.

Although recording can inhibit you to some extent, if you do it all the time then you will tend to forget you are doing it and that's when you will get the good stuff.

With Nicecast on an Apple system, you can record all your streamed audio by turning on the Archive function.  It will ask you which folder to use to store the archives and it will be automatic from that point onward.  Unknown how you do it under other streaming software but it's probably a similar mechanism.  The advantage of doing it this way is the audio is stored at high-resolution / CD-quality whereas anything recorded on the listener's side will be heavily-compressed, even more so than an MP3.

Another advantage is that there are no 'fish that get away' as that ultra-cool improv set you did will now be on your hard disk and you won't have to do much to it to spin it out to a CD.  Even if you do nothing with it other than listening, it will almost certainly help your act to pull it tighter, focus on anything that needs improvement, etc.

And don't set it and forget it.  High-resolution audio stores ten megabytes a minute.  If you record all your shows, that archive folder will get very large, very quickly.  It's important to go through it or you will have a hard disk full to the brim with broadcast archives!

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