New audio standards adopted for commercial radio ads

From next month all Commercial Radio Australia (CRA) member stations will adopt and encourage the use of the Commercial Content Technical Standards for all commercials sent and received for broadcast. The move is the next step in upgrading audio standards since the adoption of commercial production standards for DAB+ radio and the development of the easy to use Piñata production software.

 

 

Piñata simplifies the process of standardising audio and pictures to pre-set file specifications. The BWF (Broadcast Wav File) file format exported at the end of the Piñata process contains audio and data that is synched together for broadcast. It is possible to manually produce BWF files in production programs such as Protools, Garage Band, Adobe Audition and others, but the Pinata software makes the process much simpler by its drag and drop wizard menu.

Currently Pinata is only available for Windows computers, which is a draw back for studios and stations using Macs.

The content standards will apply equally to those stations broadcasting in both analogue and digital, however, where audio only is being delivered to a station email files will still be accepted for the time being, as long as the audio quality meets the technical standard of uncompressed PCM, 16bit, 48kHz.

 

The Commercial Content Technical Standards and Piñata were developed by the Commercial Content Standards Group (CCSG), a working group of CRA’s Digital Technical Advisory Committee (DTAC) to meet digital radio’s unique needs, but the audio quality and delivery process can be equally applied to digital and analogue broadcasting.

Joan Warner says CRA is “encouraging our members to implement these content standards to assure the advertising sector that the radio industry has a reliable production process.”

DTAC Chairman Des DeCean told radioinfo:  “We created Piñata to distribute all elements of a digital radio commercial together for easy handling and in the highest possible quality but this process can also be used to deliver analogue ads.”

 

The content standards were developed following extensive consultation with advertising creative directors, broadcast engineers from ARN, Austereo, DMG and Fairfax Radio and leading digital distribution organisations; AudioNet, DubSat, Music Point, DStar, Adstream and Fairfax Digital.

See full details of the standards at the link below.