So you’ve come out of the studio, high on adrenaline and keen to come back next week? Or are you wanting to cry and composing an email to Head of Operations saying you never want to see a radio studio ever again? Whichever one of these best describes you, we highly recommend you download and listen back to your show. Why? Here’s a few reasons:

• If you feel like it went badly, chances are that there was a moment in your show when something happened to throw you off. Being able to reflect on what you said/did can help you avoid the same situation happening again – perhaps you tried to discuss a topic you weren’t confident about or you struggled to turn the mics on.
• Having a recording of your show means that you can share it with friends and family, who can give you feedback on what they liked and what they’d like to hear more of. These are the core listeners for your show and can help you gain an audience if they genuinely enjoy what they hear.
• If you had a particularly good show you can use the recording to create a podcast. This can reach more listeners and those who missed out on your live show can catch up.
• It’s also a good idea to keep a record of bits of your show that you are particularly proud of. There are multiple opportunities to enter awards, both as an individual or as part of the station as a whole, and these often require demos – basically a compilation of your best bits. If radio is something you want to go into as a career then a good demos should hopefully help you to bag your dream job.

So, how do you find the recordings of your show? Good news is that each hour is automatically recorded, so all you have to do is download the individual hour for your show. To do this, you need to visit logs.insanityradio.com – this only works ON CAMPUS but you don’t have to come to the media suite to do it. The page looks a bit like the one below:

Once you’ve found the homepage, you need to select the day of your show – this is in the format YYYY-MM-DD. This will send you to the page below:

You then need to find the file for your show – each one is in the format YYYY-MM-DD-TT.mp3 (T meaning time). As shown above, the time in the file name is the start of your show and the time printed at the end is the end time, with the files saved in hour long slots. If your show is two hours long, make sure you save both files! To actually save it, right click on the blue hyperlink and select ‘Save Link As’ or ‘Save Target As’ (depending on your browser) – this will allow you to save the file to your USB stick or directly to the computer.

There will be more training material on podcasting, demos and how you can use your logs later in the term but for the mean time enjoy listening to your shows on the logs!