Radio College | Reading Room: Articles

Using FTP

by Jay Marble

I am a reporter for KRBD-FM. Our studios are in Ketchikan, Alaska but I live on, and cover, Prince of Wales Island. When I first took the job, about 2 years ago, I had to send every story to Ketchikan as a phone feed. Then I discovered ftp.

What we have is about 10 Alaska public radio stations remote reporters and volunteers sharing a ftp site. We all use a digital audio editing system called "Cool Edit 2000". Most of us have soundcards made by Echo or Gadget Labs. Cool Edit allows us to save our stories as .mp3 files.

I'll make a long story short. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP programs can be downloaded. Prices range from free to $60. It is simple to use. There are no fancy graphics or silly options. Just click on a file and it moves from your computer to the ftp site or visa versa. Most any Internet-provider will set-up a ftp site. Many Internet accounts offer 1 free ftp site with 5megs of memory.

We post stories and scripts to the ftp site. The audio quality is quite good, especially considering we used to rely on phone feeds. We save our stories in mono, 16 bit, sample rate of 32K-.mp3. "Bush Alaska" is way behind the curve as far as telephone service goes. We use regular phone lines. For most of us ISDN, Cable modems, fiber optics, etc., are years away. So our transfer rates are miserable compared to what most people can get down south. It usually takes us 2 or 3 minutes to post or pull 1 minute of audio. We are comfortable with that. In fact if we could get faster transfer times we would likely increase our sample rate (and file size) in order to realize better sound. But the ftp is still a major time saver for us. We no longer have to coordinate phone feeds between stations, and we only have to post it one time. In the old days if 5 stations wanted the story, we had to make 5 phone calls. We also have a shared document on the ftp site called "Status.doc". This is where we talk about the stories we are working on, group projects, etc. Basically it is a discussion group. Recently we set up a "mirror site". This is on a different server and ensures that we can alway post or pull or stories, even when the main site is down. Currently we are trying to figure out how to make our computers dial up the site automatically at AM, and download everything new.

Anyway that is how we use ftp. Feel free to write with questions or suggestions...

Jay Marble

We received the following response from Swedish Radio College reader Claes Andreasson.Claes shares his experience sending material from Los Angeles to Stockholm.

Hello,

My name is Claes Andreasson, I am a correspondent working for Swedish National Public Radio in Los Angeles, CA. I found your web site and read Jay Marble´s story on transferring radio stories via FTP. It caught my eye, since I have also been using the Internet for transferring stories the last couple of years, and it is always interesting to learn about the experiences colleagues have.

I started digital editing & mixing in the early 1990´s, but there was always the problem: How do I get the finished story from my computer to the Swedish NPR in Stockholm? Well, eventually it was possible to buy CD-writers at a decent price. But it takes about two business days to Fedex a CD to Sweden from California, so...

About three or four years ago, I started exchanging MPEG files with a colleague, trying to find a simple and faster way to get the story from point A to point B. And in early 1999 my first "Internet story" was aired. At that point I only had 56K-modem, which meant 1 minute of audio took about an hour to upload to my web site. And I had some close calls, when the line went down and I had to start all over again. But, knock on wood, I never missed a deadline... And I used it both at home, as well as in "remote" areas, on the road etc.

A little more than a year ago, I decided I needed a faster hook-up, and got ADSL. My news features normally run 8-10 minutes, and with the DSL it only took me 5-8 minutes to transfer them. So what if the line went down (which is has not yet...)

Since I was convinced this was a terrific solution, I started a more formal project with Swedish NPR, in order to learn from our experiences, and possible inspire others to do the same. Here I was - with a professional studio in my laptop computer, at my service 24/7, and a simple and very fast way of transferring the stories.

To add to the project we also got a FTP server in Stockholm. I usually upload a back-up copy to my web site, just in case either one goes down. The transfer rate to the FTP server is a little slower on average, but the download time in Stockholm seems to be about the same from both sites. We also tried a software based MPEG encoder (Mayah SendIt) for real-time encoding, which would enable me to do live reporting with close-to professional sound quality, via ISDN. It works fine, but in all honesty, there is a slight delay of a couple of seconds. It is OK for reporting, but tough for Q&A with a host in Stockholm.

We finished the project just before Christmas, and the experience has been great, on both sides of the Atlantic. I would be happy to seend you a copy, but unless you want to work on your Swedish, I'll just have to do a translation.

Since Swedish NPR is using MPEG, Layer 2 in the in-house computer system, that is what I use too. MPEG Layer 2, 384 kbps for stereo, and 192 kbps for mono.

I would be great to hear more about Jay Marble´s and other colleague's experiences in using this way of working.

Best Regards,

Claes Andreasson
Swedish National Public Radio