unit 14 Radio 4 audience profile

Background of BBC Radio 4:

The radio I have chosen is BBC Radio 4 which first aired on 30 September 1967; this means that BBC Radio 4 has been aired nationally for around 52 years. It is owned by global and their well-known sister station is BBC Radio 4 Extra.  Their typical content includes news, talk and drama. BBC radio 4 is completely funded by TV license.

Audience profile:

BBC Radio 4 mostly appeals to people in their 30s and over, this may be because they have programmes such as: Book of the week, shipping forecast and many more which may interest an older population.

Listening figures:

Their listening figures are quite high; the amount of people that it reaches is 11.55 million adults each week. The nationality of the population is mostly white British. The news reports attracts the largest amount of listeners at 10.34m per week, the drama shows which air in the afternoon attracts 6.69 million people a week, the comedy shows reaches around 5.52 million people per week. 

File types and sound formats

- WAV: this is an audio file format which was developed by Microsoft.

Pros and cons: An advantage of using WAV is that it is fast decoding and it can be played on most window applications that support sound. However it is a very large file size.

- AIFF: this is an audio file format which was created by APPLE Company. Its main purpose is to store sound data featuring numerous sound bitrates used in PC or other audio utilities.

Pros and Cons:  The advantage of using AIFF file is the output of exceptional sound quality however it will take up more storage than any other lossy formats.

FLAC: this is a type of lossless MP3. It is mostly used where the quality of sound is essential.

Pros and Cons: This is a compressed lossless which means that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. It takes up less space than WAV and AIFF and is becoming one the most popular formats due to it being an open source. It is also extremely fast at decoding and supports multi-channel and high-resolution streams. However it compresses less efficiently than other popular modern compressors such as Monkey’s Audio.

Mp3:

Pros and cons: It allows anyone to create their own implementation and has fast decoding, lower complexity than other sound formats such as AAC. However this sound format is lower performance than modern codecs.

 

AAC: It is a lossy format that is similar to mp3 but includes some performance improvements.

Pros and cons: It reaches transparency in most samples and for most users at around 150 kbps and has several implementations, containing ones that are high quality and free. However many players only support LC at the moment so you will have files that are valid except your player won’t play them.

Ogg Vorbis: This is an audio compression format

Pros and cons: An advantage of this is that it is easy to use high level Application Programming Interface; also it is suitable for internet- streaming. A disadvantage for this is current implementations are more computationally intensive to decode than mp3.

WMA: it stands for windows media audio and uses a lossy compression system. This is a file extension used with windows media player.

Pros and cons: An advantage of using WMA is that it is more convenient for window users and it has better sound quality in low bitrates. However as it was designed for windows it may have some compatibility problems with other platforms.

Storage:

Compression: this is extremely important in audio production as it evens out the dynamic range and it is useful to smooth out a vocal track that pitches from extremely loud to soft. This also allow you to record more precise and clear sounds as it keeps an instrument range within the range of the recording equipment.