{"id":48848,"date":"2021-05-09T08:35:55","date_gmt":"2021-05-09T12:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/?p=48848"},"modified":"2021-05-09T08:38:51","modified_gmt":"2021-05-09T12:38:51","slug":"tomls-guide-to-making-and-optimizing-shortwave-radio-sdr-music-recordings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/2021\/05\/tomls-guide-to-making-and-optimizing-shortwave-radio-sdr-music-recordings\/","title":{"rendered":"TomL’s guide to making and optimizing shortwave radio SDR music recordings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

Many thanks to\u00a0SWLing Post<\/em>\u00a0contributor,\u00a0TomL<\/a>, who shares the following guest post:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Recording Music on Shortwave<\/h1>\n

by TomL<\/strong><\/p>\n

I recently became curious about the seasonal music updates posted by Alan Roe.\u00a0 It is a nicely detailed list of musical offerings to be heard.\u00a0 Kudos to Alan who has spent the time and effort to make it much easier to see at a glance what might be on the airwaves in an easy to read tabular format.\u00a0 I do not know of any other listing specifically for shortwave music in any publication or web site.\u00a0 I especially like the way it lists everything in UTC time since I might want to look for certain time slots to record.\u00a0 For some listings, I would need to go outdoors away from noise to listen to certain broadcasts.\u00a0 Current web page is here:\u00a0 https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/resources\/alan-roes-guide-to-music-on-shortwave\/<\/a> .<\/p>\n

As a side note, I have also found a lot of music embedded in the middle of broadcasts that are unannounced, unattributed, and not part of a regular feature program.\u00a0 That can be a treasure trove of local music you might not be able to find anywhere on the internet.\u00a0 It can be worth recording a spectrum of frequencies using the capabilities of the SDR and then quickly combing through the broadcasts at two-minute intervals (most songs are three minutes or longer).\u00a0 In maybe ten minutes, I will have at least identified all of the listenable music that may or may not be worth saving to a separate file.<\/p>\n

Whether at home or outdoors, I have wanted to try to record shortwave broadcasts of music using my AirSpy HF+ but never getting around to it until now.\u00a0 There is a certain learning curve to dealing with music compared to just a news summary or editorial.\u00a0 I found myself wishing I could improve the fidelity of what I was hearing.\u00a0 From static crashes, bad power line noise, fading signals, and adjacent channel interference, it can be quite difficult to get the full appreciation from the musical impact.<\/p>\n

I am starting to monitor the stronger shortwave stations like WRMI, Radio Romania International, Radio Nacional do Amazonia, etc.\u00a0 These type of stations can be received in a strong enough manner to get good quality recordings (at least according to shortwave listening experience).\u00a0 I am also finding that I appreciate much more than before the effort that these broadcasters put into creating content\/commentary to go along with the music and little pieces of background info about the music or the artist.\u00a0 I have also noticed how exact some broadcasters are in timing the music into the limited time slots.\u00a0 For instance, Radio Romania International tries to offer one Contemporary piece of music exactly at 14 minutes, Traditional music exactly at 30 minutes, and a Folk tune exactly at 52 minutes into the program (whether in English, French, or Spanish), with nice fade-outs if the music goes too long.<\/p>\n

One thing I ran into was to bother checking my hearing range.\u00a0 If someone has impaired hearing, it does not make much sense to create files that have a lot of sound out of one’s hearing range.\u00a0 I found this YouTube video<\/a> (among a bunch of others) and listened to the frequency sweep using my Beyerdynamic DT-990 Pro headphones (audiophile\/studio type headphones). \u00a0 My hearing is approximately from 29 Hz through 14400 Hz.\u00a0 Of course, the extremes fall off drastically, and as with most people, my hearing is most sensitive in the 2000 through 6000 Hz range.<\/p>\n