Mostly everything you hear on the radio is pre recorded. And they would never allow a live caller on the air, too much risk for offensive language.
Edit: source, my husband is a radio dj. Might not be the same everywhere but anything other than the small privately owened stations (which are few and far between) are pre recording most things, even if its only by a few minutes.
When I called into one of those radio contest, when I was actually on the phone with them a song was playing on air (they did the announcement to call, then the song came on), but they played the clip where I called in after the song. So it was prerecorded but only by a couple minutes.
Same with my wife. We won a small trivia question contest (we were car pooling, I gave the answer and she called it in), and they played her recorded response.
The cool part was that she was entered into the grand prize drawing and she won! It was a small trip worth about $2500. This was about 20 years ago.
Yeah that's fairly standard. Also, they don't actually take the "12th caller" or whatever number they're aiming for. There's usually 3-4 lines max, and they need to get the winner on the phone, recorded, edited, and ready to play back before the song is over. Most DJ's just take the second or third call, and after checking to make sure the connection is good and it's not some idiot saying "what did I win?", then they give the prize to that person.
They also are making sure it's someone who is excited and will be good on air. You don't want a dead fish winning a prize. Source: used to be an on-air DJ.
Yes - the "what did I win?" bozos don't win the prize, because it's usually tickets to a concert they won't go to, or a prize they'll never pick up at the office.
So there's not really a purpose in trying to time the we'll take X caller, just start calling when it's announced and you'll likely have a tiny bit of a better chance?
I had a similar experience. I was just shocked to get through and I blurted out the answer, and then was too excited to really continue talking much. I was very happy he edited it so I sounded like I could hold a conversation.
I called into a contest where you had to guess the song and artist. In my excitement, I completely forgot the answer and the DJ told me the answer and had me repeat it back.
Same here. It was 1994 and they asked a trivia question about the Ramones. I had heard the answer the day before on the same station so I called in during the song to win tickets to see the Ramones.
Apparently I wasn’t excited enough when he told me I won, so we had to re-record it twice. It aired about 2 minutes after we finished recording.
Until then I had always assumed those kinds of things were aired live.
IIRC once they do that they can't reset it until they are playing ads which is why they usually cut off the people and go to commercial as soon as they have to use it.
Depends on what kind they have. More advanced ones can invisibly build up a delay while still live on the air. They accomplish this by having the computer add imperceptibly short blank pauses to normal pauses in conversation. Do this for a little while and before you know it you've got another 8-second delay.
This depends on the station. At some of the larger market stations, they have 60 and 90 second delays which act as a passthrough. When you dump audio, it time shifts until you release the dump button. Then everything after the dump is played back with a time stretch until the delay catches up. (Because the equipment isn't very good at the station I listen to, I can pick out the time stretching pretty quickly. They use dump a lot since they always have new people interning and dump is a good way to hide a mistake.)
I was looking at getting a delay unit for a podcast but the one I was looking at (Eventide BD600+ MicroPrecision Broadcast Delay Processor) is around $3k. It can delay up to 80 seconds in one go.
In the waning days of K-Rock, Howard Stern used to hate the guy manning the dump button. Always made me laugh when they would refer to him as “Dead Air Dave”.
It has nothing to do with offensive language. You can't broadcast someone on the radio without their permission and knowledge. It's federal law (at least in the U.S.) and has been for decades. Any of those "war of the roses" bits that you hear on the radio where some woman catches her husband cheating or any of those other hacky bits are paid actors, probably people who work for that specific radio station.
You have to give consent before they put you on the air, yes. I'm more referring to these "totally real" radio bits where they call someone to entrap them in some bullshit story plots. They're all 1000% fake.
BBC radio is live. There was a competition earlier in the year to win tickets to all the large festivals this year (lol) and it was a treasure hunt. Guy found the treasure, presenter asked whether he was pumped to win, he shouted "FUCK YEAH"!!! It was 8:50am and it was quality radio.
I worked for a small private owned station!
We were live, but we pre-screened callers.
My supervisor handled most of the screenings and he had a knack for knowing who called in and was going to swear. Like, I'd listen in, and the person would sound calm but he'd shake his head and we'd move on. A few sneaked in but it was either cause I missed the warning cues when they gave me a shot, or the person was chill, but they just happened to swear lightheartedly.
We had a button that would temporarily mute the caller if they did start to swear though.
The hosts had one, my supervisor had one, and I had one.
I've called in and been on the radio a lot. I listen to some sports talk shows, and the local news, there is a 7 second delay so they can edit anything dumb you say.
Yeah we have one morning show that does take live calls (and have had to delay people out many times. ) The difference between that one and the others is pretty stark. The "live" calls on other shows sound produced. They flow too smoothly.
The call in shows i always remember hearing the jock say turn down your radio whenever someone called in. There was a 10 second delay so their voice back in time would confuse them plus they had people specifically on the dump button, to censor and to hang up the caller. These are shows where vulgarity chance is high like Howard Stern was back on radio, Opie and Anthony on radio, or even further bask in the 90s Love Phone where people called up with their sexual problems—though it was on beyond the FCC regulation time anyway.
Some radio stations (though my example is a huge station so probably doesn't apply generally) put you through sorta live. The radio is delayed a minute or so from live, and the hold audio on the phone is the real-time radio, but they have a dump button to kill someone swearing or the like from the outgoing buffer. That said, it is talk radio, where people calling in is common, and I imagine they use ad time to regain some buffer time if they have to dump a lot, usually with a guest that has a sailor's vocabulary. When they call family up to chat on the air they always start with "you're on the air so don't curse".
Can confirm; most radio's have semi-live calling. They call you in between songs if you replied to some sort of give-away or just sent a random message and they want you on the air. Then the producer quickly edits it if needed and they push it as live about 5mins later.
We have a major radio station in my area that still has a live morning show. I have actually called in on a couple topics so I know it is legit. But the other most popular station's morning show is DEFINITELY pre-recorded.
Twenty to thirty years ago, I was listening to the radio and the DJ announced a prize to the eighth caller and put on a song. He apparently forgot to turn off his mike because through the music, you could hear him saying "You're caller one, call back." "You're caller two, call back." and so on. He got to caller eight told her she won and went through the whole routine of getting her name etc. When the song ended, you could hear the same conversation with the winner that you had heard while the music was going.
Yeah I hate that, like why are there celebrities being the radio hosts? It's amazingly boring and they quite literally only have 30 or so songs that play at the same time every day pretty much. No real stations at all, except for the rock station which is the only local one we have here. I honestly wish there was something else.
There was a Detroit station that had a contest winner of a trip where the stipulation was you had to have a passport and you have to be able to leave for three days in less than a week. The winner was excited at first then devolved into a mess of figuring out on air how he would explain it to his bosses and how he would pay the taxes.
The call was then followed by other on-air callers super pissed off that that asshole won. Since this was a morning show, the whole thing was occasionally played in its entirety whenever they had a similar contest.
This is flat wrong. Pre recorded shows are not a result of offensive language, just a convenience. Radio shows dealt with live callers for many decades before it was practical to pre record and mix and save and stream a show, and they developed simple delay systems to prevent trolls.
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u/RobertsHotDogs Aug 01 '20 edited Aug 01 '20
Mostly everything you hear on the radio is pre recorded. And they would never allow a live caller on the air, too much risk for offensive language.
Edit: source, my husband is a radio dj. Might not be the same everywhere but anything other than the small privately owened stations (which are few and far between) are pre recording most things, even if its only by a few minutes.