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Crystal clear
music, and the number you want. No needle jumps or scratchy gramophone
records. No breaks as the anchor tries to splice together a broken
tape midway. And no requests rejected. All India Radio’s Kolkata
station, a treasure-trove of vintage 78 rpm, 45 rpm and 33 rpm records,
apart from cassettes and compact discs, is entering the digital
age with the best and latest studio equipment.
Animesh Chakrabarty,
superintending engineer at AIR Kolkata, said the government-owned
broadcaster would very soon install a digital audio workstation
(DAWS). All programmes would be aired via computerised systems,
he said, with the music stored on hard discs just a mouse click
away. He added that the upgrade was not being done just to meet
the challenge of private broadcasters. "Being a national public
service broadcaster, our duty and responsibility is to provide education,
information and entertainment, while the private broadcasters are
there only for the business," he said.
AIR’s
one-year-old ‘Radio on Demand’ has a fully computerised
system, in which a caller dials a telephone number and a recorded
voice asks for the code number of the song requested. The catch
is that, to know the code number, one has to buy a booklet from
AIR’s office. "There is a difference. RoD is an unmanned
system. You dial, then a voice asks you to dial the code of the
song you want played," he said. With the AIR system, the anchor
uses a PC and mouse to retrieve the song requested by the caller.
"You can call it an electronic anurodher asar (Bengali for
request programme)," Chakrabarty said.
The biggest
advantage will be that AIR staff will no longer have to search manually
for the records, cassettes or CDs. "Not only that, turntables
and tapedecks are not so readily available now. Gramaphone records
gather dust, the tape of spools and cassettes deteriorates, and
it is very costly to maintain them," he said. "We have
already stored over 90,000 titles on hard discs, and are going to
increase the figure," he said. The system can also record and
edit fresh production. AIR’s staff announcers and programme
executives are being sent to CMC Ltd for basic computer literacy,
while its own engineers will train them on the techniques of computerised
production. Apart from FM1 (10kw stereo) and FM2 (5kw mno), the
DAWS will be introduced in all studios including Kolkata A, B, Vividh
Bharati and Special Bengali Services (SBS).
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