[Emmy]

Sniffing my cupcakes was found again, Chris played it this morning along with 'nob nob'.

[q]

I heard the rant too - but I don't blame him tbh for being hacked off.

I had a similar thing happen at a radio station I was at, not particularly impressed as I was doing a 'best of' show and we resurrected one of the old features, and they'd binned off the clips.

Didn't rant on air though, we'd picked it up whilst doing some production work beforehand but a quick email before they began deleting stuff wouldn't go amiss - can't be that hard to email 'all files before date x will be deleted from the system, please take a copy before day x if you want to keep it or it will be no longer accessible' after date x'.

Surprised the Daily Mail hasn't picked up on this one.

[chrisjames]

Chris seems to have started the n ew year a bit depressed for some reason.reading h is tweets he seems to be quite down.i wonder what's happeend.Maybe he's getting a bit down about being single or maybe just new year blues

[hdsport82]

Surprised the Daily Mail hasn't picked up on this one.

Me too, especially the bit about being told when taking a 20% pay cut that it's a privilege to work for the BBC.

[Nicola_Red]

The rant is now in the sound vault:

http://chrismoyles.net/soundvault/sound ... ileid=2559

[Johnny 1989]

the only bit about this which surprises me is the fact that the Beeb (or whoever they Sub it too) doesn't have a multitude of external hard drives with all this jazz saved forever. I know Stinton and Nic have terabyte's of Moyles data - why should any be lost, ever...?

I've said it before but I'm just glad that I never threw out the box of tapes full of 2000 & 2001 Afternoon shows because it seems as if I was the only person sad enough back then to record shows from them two years, the impression Aled has given is that the archive is in quite a state, I wouldn't be surprised if shows older than 10 years have now been wiped.

The BBC don't seem to have learnt from the old 60's/early 70's wiping of TV shows at all have they.

[shamrock student]

"Send them all off to Jersey"

Excellent rant, starts at 2hrs 22.

[bmstinton93]

I want another rant from Chris about this forum.

Chris, the show is shit now. Nowhere near as good as it used to be...

[ededwards]

the only bit about this which surprises me is the fact that the Beeb (or whoever they Sub it too) doesn't have a multitude of external hard drives with all this jazz saved forever. I know Stinton and Nic have terabyte's of Moyles data - why should any be lost, ever...?

They do, they have loads of Networked drives which would be backed up as part of an array like any large company does. Each show has it's own folder on the network drive, any pre-produced audio would have a copy on there before it is uploaded to the playout system which stores the files on a different server.
It's this server which hosts all the clips on Chris' cartwall that keeps having stuff deleted as it is shared by the whole of BBC radio.

Not a major problem for the pre-produced stuff (like the two word tango bed) which can just be reuploaded to the playout server, as Aled did during the show the other day.
But the problem is anything clipped up during the show goes directly to the playout server without a copy being saved on the network drive. It was this that Chris was asking Aled to take backups from the other day during the rant.

Issue is, its a massive ballache to remember to download a backup to the network drive a copy of any new stuff uploaded to the playout server during each show.

For you geeks, see the diagrams the the following documents: http://www.sadie.com/downloads/BBC_Tapeless_AM_Article2_0706.pdf
http://www.scisys.de/fileadmin/user_upload/MBS/PDF/diraSolutions/MBS_dira__Radio_E_090122.pdf
N.B. Highlander is the file management system, Startrack is used to clip up audio, Cartplayer is the Jingle machine.

[Nicola_Red]

"Send them all off to Jersey"

Excellent rant, starts at 2hrs 22.

Or, y'know, there's the sound clip I posted.

[ianpwilliams]

Listening to the rant now. He's got every right to complain. It should all be backed up in several places, including off-site backups. Hard drive space and fibre-optic broadband doesn't exactly make it hard. Unbelievable that someone should start deleting stuff randomly and for no good reason. I would be really angry if it happened to me.

[ianpwilliams]

Issue is, its a massive ballache to remember to download a backup to the network drive a copy of any new stuff uploaded to the playout server during each show.

Surely they could have a system which automatically backs everything up at regular intervals, possibly overnight? I would be amazed if that wasn't possible.

[q]

They must have some sort of 'cache' somewhere to use the cartwall offline (for when it is not connected to the network).

I've seen the cartwall monitor used at remote locations on OBs - surely they should be able to retrieve it from this cache?

[neilt0]

Don't diminish the value of the drops! Some may not think they are important, but you'd soon notice if they all disappeared.

It's outrageous that someone deleted 10% of them and inexcusable that there is no backup.

I have all my data on a RAID and backed up to offline backup. The BBC has a much bigger budget than me.

If there are important drops from November onwards, it's going to be easy to restore them as many of us have copies of every show. I have every show from July 2010 onwards in non-recoded AAC, so if they need "nob-nob" or stuff from that time, we can extract it from the recorded shows. It's not technically broadcast quality, but if it's just a vocal clip of a guest, 128kbps AAC is good enough. Don't forget, Chris used to do playout, including music, from Minidiscs (292 kbps ATRAC) not too long ago. Not every drop will be on the podcasts?

Anyhoo, if there's anything "really missing", let us know, Aled and we can fill it. I'm happy to clip stuff and send over uncompressed WAVs.

[Yudster]

Neil, you should put this in Ask Aled in case Al doesn't see it here. Just to be on the safe side - I reckon it might be useful if anything important is unrecoverable at their end.

[neilt0]

Neil, you should put this in Ask Aled in case Al doesn't see it here. Just to be on the safe side - I reckon it might be useful if anything important is unrecoverable at their end.

Good idea. Done and done!

[richbrown]

I only listened to this today. Wow I cannot believe that something like that could happen, at the BBC, in 2012... well in 2012 anyway. I don't care how much the BBC goes on about budget cuts or 'cutting corners', enough hard-drive space to back up those clips is certainly affordable, even getting some hosting space online via FTP would be better than nothing.

All that stuff should be automated or worst-case, as Chris said, just upload that day/week's new clips to the space and keep a record. Fans on here do more hardcore stuff than that and they're not even paid for it. Crazy.

[neilt0]

It's amazing how radio is considered so disposable.

Many BBC TV shows have been lost forever because they were either never recorded, or the tapes they were on, re-used. As you may already know, some old "lost" Dr. Who episodes were recovered and restored only because fans had made videotapes of them.

I'm astonished that the Beeb don't have every BBC radio show recorded and archived. Get with the 80s, BBC!

My other favourite radio show (also a favourite of Jimmy Carr and Chris Moyles when they are in the U.S.) has been archived by fans, but there are many shows missing.

Westwood One, the owners of the show have finally (17 years later) admitted that they have a complete high quality archive of every show, and may "at some point in the future" release them at a rate of one a week. Fans are clamouring for the "missing" shows that we don't already have, and are willing to buy them and higher quality recordings of shows we already have, but until now, Westwood One saw no value in them at all and still haven't released any. At the rate of one a week, it'll take 48 years to put them all out. Morons.

[q]

I'm astonished that the Beeb don't have every BBC radio show recorded and archived. Get with the 80s, BBC!

It costs money for archiving everything, and also for some to look after the archive to make sure it is in a logical order and people can find stuff.

I'm sure now playout and scheduling is done for the national networks through VCS scheduler, it should be easier to get metadata so people can find the clips they want and plus it can be automated - just look at how they've hooked the playout system to last.fm, but for show info like features etc you need to rely on people typing it in.

The task would be quite massive given the amount of radio networks the BBC has, and also to tape everything 24 hours indefinitely is not that practical, you would need mountains of hard drive space. That said, i'm sure it wouldn't be beyond the realms of possibility if they hooked it up to the Coyopa system that does BBC radio streaming.

Come to think of it the BBC DOES archive radio, albeit temporarily, as part of OFCOM rules/licenses you need to have 42 days of continuous radio archive in case of complaints by listeners. Hence how Greg James is able to find any outtakes/funny clips for best bit of the radio from yesterday.

[R94N]

I bet they would get through terabytes a day (at least) if the BBC recorded and stored everything they played out on their various stations.

[neilt0]

Wow. What ridiculous arguments. You don't think TV shows get archived?

Storing every show as Lossless audio (44kHz/16-bit, FLAC) would equate to ~8GB per day or 2.75TB per year (per station).

Let's say they have triple redundancy and enterprise-class "Raid edition" drives. Storing one radio station's output would cost £900 per year. There are 59 BBC radio stations, so that would total £53,000 in storage costs per year. The BBC has a budget of £5 billion per year.

[chrysostom]

Isn't it more a case of storing the individual elements of the show, not recording the show itself?

eg. the difference between having a 'boing' sound effect from an episode of fireman sam in 1994, and having a video copy of the episode which the sound effect was in.

[neilt0]

Isn't it more a case of storing the individual elements of the show, not recording the show itself?

eg. the difference between having a 'boing' sound effect from an episode of fireman sam in 1994, and having a video copy of the episode which the sound effect was in.

Well, both are easy. You automate recording the entire show by adding another output to the iPlayer encoder.

As for clips, they already have a workflow for clipping those and adding to VCS, so add one more step to save that clip to another destination and back it up. As Chris says, it's not rocket science.

[Ajescent]

Long live 2 word Tango!

[jamiec21]

I think the lesson the Chris Moyles Show production team can learn from this is to give their entire audio archive to us. We'll look after it...