Here’s a quick guide on how to use the Insanity Player to upload content to the website

First, upload your show to MixCloud like you normally would. You can use any MixCloud account, it won’t matter.

Go to the Insanity Player admin page – https://insanityradio.com/player/wp-admin/

Under “Episodes”, click “Add New”. This will take us to a form that looks like this.

Copy the link to your MixCloud upload, and paste it in the “Programme URL” box.

If you don’t have a Programme URL box (this may happen if you’re uploading your first show), click “Screen Options” and make sure that you have the Box for it, like below:

Now we can enter the title, a description, and an excerpt.

We’re nearly there – just two more things to do.

First, we need to select a “Category”. If you don’t see your show in the list, click “Add New”.

Next, we need to upload a photo. Click Change Featured Image and you can select an image.

Finally, we need to enter the time it was broadcast. To do this, click Edit next to “publish immediately”.

To conclude, make sure you’ve done the following

• Entered a MixCloud URL
• Entered a title, description and excerpt
• Changed the date to match
• Entered a category
• Entered a photo

Now, we can click “Publish”, and it will go live immediately! 🎉

If you’re only used to uploading music through Nerve, and want to play something else like a vox-pop, interview, or pre-record, here’s the guide to getting it onto the system.

Do not import songs this way!

• Log into Myriad as yourself! If it’s already logged in, go to File, Logout, then enter your username and password.

• Click MediaWall, and click “Jump”. Enter 100,000 in the box, and click Ok.

• Scroll using the Left/Right buttons, until you find an empty place
• Drag your MP3, WAV or whatever into this place. It will import it and get it ready for airplay.

• It’s imported, but now you need to fill in the metadata! So right click and hit Edit.

• Click Save, and drag this into the log like you would any other item!

Sharing visual content from your show? Here are some creator 101 tips for YouTube and other video platforms.

If possible, ask the Head of Visual Content (e: visual@insanity) to upload the content directly onto our YouTube channels.

This really depends on your target audience, but if you’re an entertainment show trying to #SocialGoals, this is a great place to start.

1. Short & Sweet

For visual radio, long-form video doesn’t work best. Remember the “one thought one link” rule from entertainment radio – apply that to videos if you want to target .

For instance, if you have a live act performing a set of songs, make sure each song has its own video. It’s fine to have ten or twenty seconds of dialogue at the start and end, as this helps give context.

2. Copyright Check

Cut out all music! Be wary if you’ve used a bed – if it’s a well known song instead of an Insanity specific bed, it may get flagged.

YouTube has a PRS license, which means they pay for song covers (great for live music!) Facebook does too, as of February – covering all their platforms such as Instagram, Messenger.

3. Look & Feel

Make sure you “top and tail” your videos, so they’re instantly recognisable as ours. The top contains our “sonic logo” (as well as logo), so people immediately know what they’re watching is an Insanity production.

The “tail” lets us suggest videos to viewers in the last 5-10 or so seconds of a YouTube video.

If you’re not sure how to do this, you can send your unedited video to the Head of Visual, but they won’t be able to get it published as a priority.

4. Sharing

Videos should, where possible, be uploaded to Insanity’s social media channels. From there, you can share them on your own pages. Due to how Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms work, people are more likely to see your videos this way.

People are more likely to watch videos on Facebook if they’re uploaded as a Facebook video. Opening another app is a pain, and you lose out on autoplay.

Our Facebook videos get thousands of views.

Don’t share music/covers on Twitter, as this is illegal because they currently have no licensing agreement.

If you’re doing a planned visualised segment, chances are you’ll want to manually control which cameras are live. This is called vision mixing.

Insanity uses a bit of kit it built called automix to control the cameras, but you can manually override it. To do that, open a web browser, and go to http://10.32.0.125:9292 . This can only be done from an Insanity network connected PC (so any one in the office or studios).

This’ll show you a page somewhat like this.

automix remote control – GoggleBox.

When you close the GoggleBox web-page, the camera settings will revert back to default.

In the above screenshot, the cameras are in Auto mode.

None of what we can adjust on this page affects sound.

Turning Off the Slate

The slate is the “holding picture” (currently a vinyl with the classic Insanity headphones) used when the cameras and microphones aren’t live. If we want to override this so that the cameras are always live, we can click the toggle button labelled “Slate”, which will change to “Wide”. In the “Wide” mode, the wide angle camera will always be live when the microphones are off.

Manually Selecting Cameras

Click the “Auto” toggle button. It will slide to “Manual”, and change colour to grey. The other buttons will become visible again, and you can click them.

To change which camera/input is live, double click/tap it. The first click will put the camera into preview mode (this is important for technical reasons), and the second click will make it live. The live camera will not change unless you either shut GoggleBox, change the mode back to Auto, or click another camera.

Working on a podcast, video, or some on-air segment that’s pre-recorded? Here are a list of things you should always check off before airing and/or uploading a clip.

This assumes you have a relatively basic understanding of audio. If not, there are some brilliant tutorials out there – we’ll be writing some of our own guides soon!

Pre-production check-list:

1. Your microphone is close to the source. But not too close – nobody should be making out with the mic. 10-20cm is a good distance.

   If this isn’t particularly easy to achieve, have a listen before you record. If you don’t, it’s almost impossible to remove them in post. So plug in a pair of headphones, and ensure:

   • The target isn’t drowned out by the background noise. If you can’t check, go somewhere quiet.
   • The target isn’t echo-ey (the bathroom effect). Is their speech nice and clear?

     If any of the above are true, move the microphone closer.

2. Ensure that you’ve got enough microphones. Try and get the Zoom, not the Tascam, as this lets you plug in more mics. Make sure:
   1. You have a different microphone for everyone talking. For instance, your interviewee has a handheld (with better quality), and you have the portable recorder
      OR
   2. You have the one microphone closest to your interviewee. You can always re-record your questions later on, but obviously not theirs.
3. If outside, you have a windshield on your microphones to prevent that yuck whooshing sound.
4. Check the levels before you record.
   1. When your guests speak, the level ideally shouldn’t go above 75% on the VU (volume unit) meter.
   2. It shouldn’t be normally below 40%, as for technical digital recording reasons your quality becomes lower & noisier.
5. Record phone calls using the unit in the studio, not off a mobile phone. Cell tower quality is really poor.
6. If you’re shooting video:
   1. Avoid using just the shotgun microphone on your camera. The audio from these is almost always unusable. Give your presenter a handheld, use a clip-on/wireless mic, or find a boom operator.
   2. If covering an event, ask the organisers ahead of time if they can provide you with an audio feed. The Union are usually willing to do this. You can probably plug the XLR directly into your camera.

Once you have the audio back in the edit suite, import it into Audacity and split all the tracks into mono. This’ll make mixing easier.

Post-production checklist:

1. The overall levels are OK. The volume shouldn’t go between loud and quiet across different segments. You can apply some compression to achieve this, or use Audiomatic on your final mix to master the audio.
2. Speech isn’t panned to the left or right. Put on a pair of headphones – if one of your ears receives special treatment, ensure the audio tracks are split to mono.
3. The average volume of your clip, in Audacity, sits at about 80% height on the blue wave form (or, when you play it, doesn’t go above -4 on the green meters). Try to avoid red vertical lines, as these represent clipping (which your audience can hear as distortion).

You can fix some of these issues using Audiomatic – an internal tool we built specifically to help you do this with minimal effort. If you’re not an Insanity member, you can achieve a similar effect using Stereo Tool and the Syrtho preset – our tool is just a shortcut for this.

All music used in broadcast needs to come through the right channels. If it doesn’t, then the broadcaster risks getting in huge trouble. Obviously, we pay for all our music. Scary bits aside, let’s discuss how to source high quality music for your show.

Prerequisite: Music Quality

Music comes in all shapes and sizes. You’ve probably head of MP3 and WAV. There are other formats such as M4A, AAC, and FLAC that we use in broadcast. This will explain what all of that means. If you don’t care, you can skip over it. It’s useful to know, though.

You’ve probably noticed that MP3 files are waaaaay smaller than WAVs. This is because they apply clever tricks to remove bits of audio that humans aren’t likely to hear. As a result, this lowers the sound quality – known as “lossy/compression”. There are different intensities of compression that result in different “bit rates”. These are the ones for MP3:

128kbps is regarded as transparent (i.e. unnoticable) to (very very roughly) about 50% of people. But that’s not good enough for broadcast. This is about the top quality of YouTube.

192kbps is regarded as transparent to about 70% of people. Still not good enough for broadcast.

256kbps and above are transparent to 99% of people, which is probably acceptable.

In modern M4A/AAC, anything above 192kbps is probably okay to use in broadcast.

If you’re thinking “why can’t I just increase the bit rate?” – you sadly can’t. If you’ve ever tried to make a small digital photo bigger, you’ve probably found it’s impossible. It’s the same concept with audio. Sadly, some online stores try to fake the bit rate and then pretend it’s higher when in fact it isn’t.

We can’t use tracks that aren’t above 256kbps or similar. This is because the station uses clever processing techniques to make our output sound better, but this does not work well with low bit rate MP3s (i.e. 192kbps or below). You really can hear it, and it sounds very unprofessional.

WAVs and FLACs are large files, but they keep all of the sound quality.

Nerve will do most of the hard work here in determining if a song is of good enough quality. If it isn’t, it’ll reject it. Before Nerve, this was not possible.

Promos

A lot of our music actually comes from record labels. The Head of Music receives lots of emails with links to tracks. If it’s relatively mainstream, chances our you can ask them very nicely to see if they have it.

You can also approach a record label directly. As this blog is public, I can’t share our contacts, but our Head of Music will again be happy to assist! Often, you can find a bands publicist through Google.

Online Stores

I Like Music

This store is designed for broadcasters. Registering an account is free. The best bit about this store is that downloads are significantly cheaper than iTunes and Amazon. It is done on a credits system, so purchasing 50 credits will get you 50 songs at 63p a track. There’s no minimum, but bulk credits give bulk discounts.

When selecting a .WAV, you’ll need to enter/search for the track in Nerve. This is because WAVs don’t include computer readable song info, unlike most MP3s.

iTunes

The iTunes store lets you download tracks at 99p a pop. Don’t forget that this is separate to Apple Music, which is a streaming service not a downloads service.

You can select the M4As from your “iTunes” music folder and upload them directly to Nerve.

Amazon

Amazon will give you an MP3 download of a track for 99p. However, disappointingly in some cases, the actual quality of the download can be very low. Just search for a song on Amazon and buy it like any other track.

CDs

Shop around in second hand stores like CEX, buy new, or raid your parents’ vast CD collection. You can then rip them (DON’T use Windows Media Player, use “fr:eac” with WAV or FLAC as described here) and upload them to Nerve.

Have fun, and stay legal!