TMC
2012-10-15 07:12:52 UTC
http://www.botecomm.com/bote/radio/radiodelay.html
Synchronizing Radio and TV
Problem:
Joe Buck. Tim McCarver. Do I have to spell it out for you? They're
obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir.
You've followed your team all season long with Your Guys who know the
team up close and personal; guys who describe the game accurately
while providing useful insight; guys like Hall-of-Famer Jon Miller,
Joe Angel, Charlie Slowes, and so on. But the sound from the local
radio play-by-play is not synchronized with the video flashing across
your television screen. You either hear an exciting play unfold only
to witness the visual evidence 10 seconds later, or else you see it
happen before the excited announcer describes it on the radio. Bummer.
Solution:
Mute the TV. Get your radio sound and your television picture in sync,
and you won't even need J.C. Chasez to do it.
There is no way that I can tell you how much delay there will be
between radio and television, nor which will be ahead of the other. It
depends on where the game is relative to the transmission path, how
many satellite links are involved, processing equipment latency, and a
thousand other dependencies.
Knowing this, you will need to tune your delay for each game, and
sometimes tweak it during the game as well. Sometimes the radio will
be ahead of the TV, other times the TV will be ahead of the radio.
If the TV is ahead of the radio and you have a DVR this is good news!
You can simply pause your DVR momentarily until you get it
synchronized with the radio play-by-play.
If the radio is ahead of the TV video, then you have to delay it to
match up with the images on your screen. The latter problem is what
this page hopes to help you solve.
Don't be put off by the many steps listed, I had to expand on my
initial handful of paragraphs because some people...well, let's just
say some people are not sound engineers like I am. Hey, it's not a
perfect world!
What You Need
Radio Delay Utility
I recently discovered RadioDelay by Daan Systems. It does what its
name suggests: it delays audio in your Windows sound subsystem by up
30 seconds, based on your configuration of it.
Get RadioDelay direct from the author at the link in the pane to the
right.
Griffin iMic
I'm only a very satisfied customer and own 4 of these neat little USB
dongles that add a sound card to your computer. If you don't want to
fuss with the V.A.C. software (which can be a bit confusing), just
plug in an iMic and in seconds you have another sound card. Plug a
physical cable into the output of the iMic and then into the input of
your built-in sound card and you can use RadioDelay. The iMic is also
a great replacement for sound cards that have crapped out in laptops.
Order your iMic direct from Amazon at the link in the pane to the
right.
Virtual Audio Cable
VAC fakes out Windows into thinking that there is a cable from your
sound card output looped back to your sound card input, but it's all
done in software.
The author is Russian and seems like a good guy, although the help
text sometimes requires several reads to figure out. It works great
for me, but you must be careful with the settings of V.A.C. or else it
drops the audio level by 12dB for each pass through one of its virtual
cables. I had my doubts since a good percentage of malware comes from
Russia these days, but it passed my virus scan. Let me know if you
detect something evil.
You need administrator rights on your computer to install VAC since it
installs a driver to do its dirty work.
The free trial version of VAC lets you know it via a female voice that
barks "TRIAL" every 5 to 10 seconds. If you can't live with that, then
pay the guy his license fee and get rid of the trial voice reminder.
The payment process is fairly quick, but be sure to do all this setup
well before the Big Game or you'll drive yourself crazy.
Get Virtual Audio Cable from the link in the pane to the upper right.
Guitar Stomp Box
If you or a long-haired hippie friend have a guitar effects box lying
around (or even hooked up right now) rewire it in place of the
RadioDelay computer to get the desired delay. Set feedback = 0, set
wet mix to 100%, dry = 0% and adjust the delay time to sync. (thanx Ex-
Pitcher)
Making It Work
Radio Delay With A Physical Radio Receiver
Refer to the connection diagram for a physical radio to get an idea of
how to connect your audio cables if you have a receiver or MLB iPhone
or Android app listening to the ball game.
Use RadioDelay by itself if you are listening to the game on a
physical radio, either your AM or FM broadcast receiver, XM satellite
radio, or the MLB Gameday Audio app on Android or iPhone. Plug the
line output of your phone or radio into your computer's line input
using a standard stereo sound cable with 3.5mm stereo plug to go into
your sound card line input.
If your radio only has speaker outputs it will blow away your sound
card input if you just hook it up directly. Radio Shack sells an
attenuating patch cord, but it is monaural only. This doesn't really
matter since baseball play-by-play is not stereo anyway. Look for
Radio Shack part number 42-2461 and get any adapters you'll need for
your particular equipment. This cable has an RCA male plug on one end
and a 3.5mm mono plug on the other.
It's easy to configure RadioDelay. Just tell it the input port and
output port to use in your sound subsystem, select how long you want
it to delay audio, then click the start arrow button.
Next, open Windows Mixer or the mixer utility that works with your
sound card, go to the Playback settings and MUTE THE LINE INPUT so
that you only hear the delayed audio. Each sound card uses different
names for each setting, so these are only examples shown here.
Then go to the Recording or Input settings, select the Line Input
where your radio is plugged in, and set the level control to a level
that sounds good to you. I find that I need everything cranked all the
way up since these utilities seem to knock down the volume level as
part of the process.
Tune your radio to the desired baseball game and click the Play arrow
on RadioDelay to begin the audio delay process for the number of
seconds that you set with the slider control. After the amount of
delay that you set, you should hear the sound come out of the
speakers. If you still hear the real-time audio, go back to the mixer
Playback settings and MUTE the Playback line where the live radio
audio originates, usually Line Input.
Tweak the delay setting to get the play-by-play audio to match what
you see on your television. It's best to wait for a pitch and time the
ball hitting the bat or the catcher's glove at the exact same time
that you hear it delayed from the radio. My DirecTV HR24 DVR does not
like me pausing close to the real-time end of its buffer; if I pause
it when it's "live" and then un-pause it shortly thereafter, it jumps
back about 20 seconds which is no help at all. I have to pause a good
15-20 seconds to fine-tune it. To compensate for the DVR I set
RadioDelay to its maximum of 30 seconds to give my DVR plenty of
headroom slop time to work with. Then I use the DVR pause control to
get the radio and TV in perfect sync.
Radio Delay With MLB Gameday Streaming Audio (software only)
If you listen to baseball games on MLB Gameday you need to get the
audio out of the Flash player and back into your computer so that
RadioDelay has something to work with. You have three options:
a physical cable plugged between your first computer's Line Output and
your second computer's Line Input jacks. Diagram
a physical cable plugged between your computer's Line Output and Line
Input jacks, with a second sound device to listen to it through your
speakers Diagram
the Virtual Audio Cable utility, all software, no cables. Diagram
If you choose option 1, run RadioDelay on the second computer (with
the speakers). This is the computer (the laptop in my diagram) that
has the cable hooked to its Line Input to bring the MLB Gameday audio
into it from the first computer. Refer to the RadioDelay screen up
above, it's the same configuration in this case.
If you choose option 2, keep your wits about you as to which sound
device hosts which end of the cable. If you're not sure, just play
with the all the settings until you get things configured properly;
there are only a finite number of choices anyway.
VAC Setup (Option 3)
If you download and install Virtual Audio Cable, your physical sound
card is left available to drive your speakers, which is why this
solution is the least messy once you get it set up the first time.
You need to be an administrator on your computer to install VAC
(Virtual Audio Cable).
Once you install it you will have a number of choices in your Start
menu for it. VAC Control Panel lets you configure a bunch of different
settings that I have yet to figure out completely. If you're in doubt,
try setting "Stream fmt" to NONE and click "Set". This leaves all the
settings wide open. Then over near the left side of VAC Control Panel
click "Restart" to restart the driver with the new settings.
IMPORTANT! Next, open Windows XP Control Panel, go to Sounds and Audio
Devices (I don't know what it is in Vista and Windows 7), and click
the Audio tab. Set the default sound playback or rendering device to
"Virtual Cable 1" so that MLB Gameday's Flash player will know to send
its audio to VAC instead of directly to your speakers.
Windows Vista instructions courtesy drdata24:
Before starting audio source (e.g. MLB Audio):
Right click Sound Icon in Notification Area, select Playback Devices
and select "Line 1" as DEFAULT.
Open RadioDelay, set Input Device to Line 1, and Output Device to
Speakers
Set Delay timing (try 4.3 for TBS, 10.4 for FOX)
Press Play button on RadioDelay panel
Start audio source
Next, start RadioDelay with Input Device set to Virtual Cable 1 and
the Output set to your default sound card.
The secret to getting Virtual Audio Cable to work well is to open up
its control panel, then start whatever will be accepting the audio,
like Radio Delay or your media player/recorder or audio level meter or
whatever. Observe the settings that light up in V.A.C. control panel
and enter those exact settings into the "Cable Parameters" section and
set "Stream fmt" to "Cable range" to make it use these new settings.
Now, stop Radio Delay or the player, then click the "Set" button on
the VAC control panel. If you don't stop Radio Delay to release the
sound device, clicking "Set" will bomb and lose all the settings that
you just entered.
Now that the underpinnings have been configured, it's time to open up
your desired baseball game in MLB Gameday. The audio should trickle
through Virtual Audio Cable, into RadioDelay, and ultimately out to
your speakers.
If the output section is configured properly you will hear a female
voice say "trial" every 10 seconds or so. This is your clue that the
output half is set up correctly. If you paid the VAC license fee and
have the pro version you will not hear this reminder voice. If the
rest of it is configured properly, you should hear your MLB Gameday
audio and can proceed to tweak your delay to match your television.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Major-League-Baseball-on-ABC-CBS-Fox-NBC/187521718026272?fref=ts
Synchronizing Radio and TV
Problem:
Joe Buck. Tim McCarver. Do I have to spell it out for you? They're
obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir.
You've followed your team all season long with Your Guys who know the
team up close and personal; guys who describe the game accurately
while providing useful insight; guys like Hall-of-Famer Jon Miller,
Joe Angel, Charlie Slowes, and so on. But the sound from the local
radio play-by-play is not synchronized with the video flashing across
your television screen. You either hear an exciting play unfold only
to witness the visual evidence 10 seconds later, or else you see it
happen before the excited announcer describes it on the radio. Bummer.
Solution:
Mute the TV. Get your radio sound and your television picture in sync,
and you won't even need J.C. Chasez to do it.
There is no way that I can tell you how much delay there will be
between radio and television, nor which will be ahead of the other. It
depends on where the game is relative to the transmission path, how
many satellite links are involved, processing equipment latency, and a
thousand other dependencies.
Knowing this, you will need to tune your delay for each game, and
sometimes tweak it during the game as well. Sometimes the radio will
be ahead of the TV, other times the TV will be ahead of the radio.
If the TV is ahead of the radio and you have a DVR this is good news!
You can simply pause your DVR momentarily until you get it
synchronized with the radio play-by-play.
If the radio is ahead of the TV video, then you have to delay it to
match up with the images on your screen. The latter problem is what
this page hopes to help you solve.
Don't be put off by the many steps listed, I had to expand on my
initial handful of paragraphs because some people...well, let's just
say some people are not sound engineers like I am. Hey, it's not a
perfect world!
What You Need
Radio Delay Utility
I recently discovered RadioDelay by Daan Systems. It does what its
name suggests: it delays audio in your Windows sound subsystem by up
30 seconds, based on your configuration of it.
Get RadioDelay direct from the author at the link in the pane to the
right.
Griffin iMic
I'm only a very satisfied customer and own 4 of these neat little USB
dongles that add a sound card to your computer. If you don't want to
fuss with the V.A.C. software (which can be a bit confusing), just
plug in an iMic and in seconds you have another sound card. Plug a
physical cable into the output of the iMic and then into the input of
your built-in sound card and you can use RadioDelay. The iMic is also
a great replacement for sound cards that have crapped out in laptops.
Order your iMic direct from Amazon at the link in the pane to the
right.
Virtual Audio Cable
VAC fakes out Windows into thinking that there is a cable from your
sound card output looped back to your sound card input, but it's all
done in software.
The author is Russian and seems like a good guy, although the help
text sometimes requires several reads to figure out. It works great
for me, but you must be careful with the settings of V.A.C. or else it
drops the audio level by 12dB for each pass through one of its virtual
cables. I had my doubts since a good percentage of malware comes from
Russia these days, but it passed my virus scan. Let me know if you
detect something evil.
You need administrator rights on your computer to install VAC since it
installs a driver to do its dirty work.
The free trial version of VAC lets you know it via a female voice that
barks "TRIAL" every 5 to 10 seconds. If you can't live with that, then
pay the guy his license fee and get rid of the trial voice reminder.
The payment process is fairly quick, but be sure to do all this setup
well before the Big Game or you'll drive yourself crazy.
Get Virtual Audio Cable from the link in the pane to the upper right.
Guitar Stomp Box
If you or a long-haired hippie friend have a guitar effects box lying
around (or even hooked up right now) rewire it in place of the
RadioDelay computer to get the desired delay. Set feedback = 0, set
wet mix to 100%, dry = 0% and adjust the delay time to sync. (thanx Ex-
Pitcher)
Making It Work
Radio Delay With A Physical Radio Receiver
Refer to the connection diagram for a physical radio to get an idea of
how to connect your audio cables if you have a receiver or MLB iPhone
or Android app listening to the ball game.
Use RadioDelay by itself if you are listening to the game on a
physical radio, either your AM or FM broadcast receiver, XM satellite
radio, or the MLB Gameday Audio app on Android or iPhone. Plug the
line output of your phone or radio into your computer's line input
using a standard stereo sound cable with 3.5mm stereo plug to go into
your sound card line input.
If your radio only has speaker outputs it will blow away your sound
card input if you just hook it up directly. Radio Shack sells an
attenuating patch cord, but it is monaural only. This doesn't really
matter since baseball play-by-play is not stereo anyway. Look for
Radio Shack part number 42-2461 and get any adapters you'll need for
your particular equipment. This cable has an RCA male plug on one end
and a 3.5mm mono plug on the other.
It's easy to configure RadioDelay. Just tell it the input port and
output port to use in your sound subsystem, select how long you want
it to delay audio, then click the start arrow button.
Next, open Windows Mixer or the mixer utility that works with your
sound card, go to the Playback settings and MUTE THE LINE INPUT so
that you only hear the delayed audio. Each sound card uses different
names for each setting, so these are only examples shown here.
Then go to the Recording or Input settings, select the Line Input
where your radio is plugged in, and set the level control to a level
that sounds good to you. I find that I need everything cranked all the
way up since these utilities seem to knock down the volume level as
part of the process.
Tune your radio to the desired baseball game and click the Play arrow
on RadioDelay to begin the audio delay process for the number of
seconds that you set with the slider control. After the amount of
delay that you set, you should hear the sound come out of the
speakers. If you still hear the real-time audio, go back to the mixer
Playback settings and MUTE the Playback line where the live radio
audio originates, usually Line Input.
Tweak the delay setting to get the play-by-play audio to match what
you see on your television. It's best to wait for a pitch and time the
ball hitting the bat or the catcher's glove at the exact same time
that you hear it delayed from the radio. My DirecTV HR24 DVR does not
like me pausing close to the real-time end of its buffer; if I pause
it when it's "live" and then un-pause it shortly thereafter, it jumps
back about 20 seconds which is no help at all. I have to pause a good
15-20 seconds to fine-tune it. To compensate for the DVR I set
RadioDelay to its maximum of 30 seconds to give my DVR plenty of
headroom slop time to work with. Then I use the DVR pause control to
get the radio and TV in perfect sync.
Radio Delay With MLB Gameday Streaming Audio (software only)
If you listen to baseball games on MLB Gameday you need to get the
audio out of the Flash player and back into your computer so that
RadioDelay has something to work with. You have three options:
a physical cable plugged between your first computer's Line Output and
your second computer's Line Input jacks. Diagram
a physical cable plugged between your computer's Line Output and Line
Input jacks, with a second sound device to listen to it through your
speakers Diagram
the Virtual Audio Cable utility, all software, no cables. Diagram
If you choose option 1, run RadioDelay on the second computer (with
the speakers). This is the computer (the laptop in my diagram) that
has the cable hooked to its Line Input to bring the MLB Gameday audio
into it from the first computer. Refer to the RadioDelay screen up
above, it's the same configuration in this case.
If you choose option 2, keep your wits about you as to which sound
device hosts which end of the cable. If you're not sure, just play
with the all the settings until you get things configured properly;
there are only a finite number of choices anyway.
VAC Setup (Option 3)
If you download and install Virtual Audio Cable, your physical sound
card is left available to drive your speakers, which is why this
solution is the least messy once you get it set up the first time.
You need to be an administrator on your computer to install VAC
(Virtual Audio Cable).
Once you install it you will have a number of choices in your Start
menu for it. VAC Control Panel lets you configure a bunch of different
settings that I have yet to figure out completely. If you're in doubt,
try setting "Stream fmt" to NONE and click "Set". This leaves all the
settings wide open. Then over near the left side of VAC Control Panel
click "Restart" to restart the driver with the new settings.
IMPORTANT! Next, open Windows XP Control Panel, go to Sounds and Audio
Devices (I don't know what it is in Vista and Windows 7), and click
the Audio tab. Set the default sound playback or rendering device to
"Virtual Cable 1" so that MLB Gameday's Flash player will know to send
its audio to VAC instead of directly to your speakers.
Windows Vista instructions courtesy drdata24:
Before starting audio source (e.g. MLB Audio):
Right click Sound Icon in Notification Area, select Playback Devices
and select "Line 1" as DEFAULT.
Open RadioDelay, set Input Device to Line 1, and Output Device to
Speakers
Set Delay timing (try 4.3 for TBS, 10.4 for FOX)
Press Play button on RadioDelay panel
Start audio source
Next, start RadioDelay with Input Device set to Virtual Cable 1 and
the Output set to your default sound card.
The secret to getting Virtual Audio Cable to work well is to open up
its control panel, then start whatever will be accepting the audio,
like Radio Delay or your media player/recorder or audio level meter or
whatever. Observe the settings that light up in V.A.C. control panel
and enter those exact settings into the "Cable Parameters" section and
set "Stream fmt" to "Cable range" to make it use these new settings.
Now, stop Radio Delay or the player, then click the "Set" button on
the VAC control panel. If you don't stop Radio Delay to release the
sound device, clicking "Set" will bomb and lose all the settings that
you just entered.
Now that the underpinnings have been configured, it's time to open up
your desired baseball game in MLB Gameday. The audio should trickle
through Virtual Audio Cable, into RadioDelay, and ultimately out to
your speakers.
If the output section is configured properly you will hear a female
voice say "trial" every 10 seconds or so. This is your clue that the
output half is set up correctly. If you paid the VAC license fee and
have the pro version you will not hear this reminder voice. If the
rest of it is configured properly, you should hear your MLB Gameday
audio and can proceed to tweak your delay to match your television.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Major-League-Baseball-on-ABC-CBS-Fox-NBC/187521718026272?fref=ts