Aircheck yourself without thinking about it

Every program director who has ever sat across a desk from a host has said the same sentence: you should be airchecking yourself. They’re right. It’s the single fastest way to get better at this, and it costs nothing.

Almost nobody does it.

That isn’t laziness, and it’s worth being precise about why, because the reason tells you what the fix has to look like. Airchecking yourself the old way is four jobs stacked on top of each other, all of them during the two minutes you’re least able to do anything else:

1. Find a recorder and start it before you open the mic.
2. Remember to stop it after.
3. Work out, later, which of the eleven files is the break you wanted.
4. Put it somewhere you will ever look again.

Any one of those is trivial. All four, at 6:12am, between a song ending and a weather hit, is a project. So the recorder doesn’t get started, and the year goes by, and the only time you hear yourself is when somebody makes a montage for a Christmas party.

What we did about it

There’s a button called Aircheck on the studio rail, sitting under the clock. Not on one screen — every screen, including the feed, Reading Mode and the prompter.

Press it when you open the mic. Press it again when you’re done.

That’s the whole interaction. The clip is captured from your station’s stream, named for the day and the break, and filed under Recordings in Body of Work and on that day’s show. If you had a break open when you pressed it, the clip sits beside that break’s script, so the words and the performance are in the same place for as long as you keep them.

The button is everywhere on purpose

It started life only on Reading Mode and the prompter, on the perfectly sensible theory that a host is looking at one of those just before they talk.

That theory was wrong on its first morning. The first thing anybody actually wanted to record was an adlib over a song segue — no script, nothing open, and therefore no button. Which is backward: the unscripted moments are arguably the ones most worth hearing back, because there’s nothing to compare them against except your memory of how it went, and your memory is generous.

The one number to set first

Your stream runs behind your microphone. Always. Encoding, buffering and the CDN between you and a listener add somewhere between five and forty seconds, and the number is a property of your particular chain — nobody can guess it for you.

If the software doesn’t know that number, it starts recording when you press the button, which means it captures the last thirty seconds of the record you were talking over and misses the end of what you said.

So there’s a field on your account page next to the stream address: stream delay, in seconds.

You’re measuring one thing: how many seconds pass between you saying a word into the microphone and that word coming out of your stream. Here is how to get it.

What you need: a phone, and two minutes of a song.

1. On the phone, open your station’s stream — the same address a listener would use — and turn the volume up. Take the phone out of the studio, or at least away from the monitors, so you are not hearing the room as well.
2. Open the mic and say the time out loud, the way you would on the air: “Six forty-two and ten seconds.”
3. The moment you finish saying it, start counting seconds. One thousand one, one thousand two, and so on.
4. Stop counting when you hear yourself say it on the phone.

The number you stopped on is your stream delay. If you counted to twelve, your answer is 12.

Now put it in

Open your stream delay setting →

That opens your account page in a new tab, scrolled to the right field with an orange line beside it and the cursor already in it. You are looking for Stream delay (seconds), directly under Stream address.

1. Type the number you counted.
2. Press Save station at the bottom of that box.
3. The page says it saved and offers to close this tab. Press it and come back here.

If you have not put your stream address in yet, do that in the box just above — the delay has nothing to measure against until there is a stream to record.

That is the whole measurement. It is usually somewhere between five and forty seconds, and there is no wrong answer — whatever you counted is the truth about your chain.

Why it matters: get it right and a clip starts where you started talking. Leave it at zero and every clip starts a minute early, with the end of what you said cut off.

Do this once. If your stream setup changes — new encoder, new host, new bitrate — count it again.

What to actually listen for

Recording yourself is easy. Listening back usefully is the skill, and most people do it wrong the first few times by listening for whether they sounded good. You’ll always sound worse to yourself than you do to anyone else. That isn’t information.

Three things that are:

Where you sped up. Almost everybody accelerates through the part they’re least sure about. Find that moment and you’ve found the sentence you didn’t believe. Rewrite it, or cut it.

The word you leaned on. Everybody has one. Obviously. Basically. Right? You can’t hear it live and you can’t un-hear it once you’ve.

How you got out. The end of a break is the part hosts practice least and program directors notice most. If you consistently trail off and let the song rescue you, that’s fixable in a week — but only once you’ve heard yourself do it four times in a row.

Why an ordinary Tuesday

The temptation is to aircheck the big show — the outside broadcast, the interview you were nervous about, the morning something happened.

Do the opposite. Record a Tuesday.

The big show isn’t your job. Two hundred ordinary mornings are your job, and the habits that make them good or forgettable are only visible on a day when nothing was at stake. An ordinary Tuesday is the honest sample.

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Aircheck is part of ShowPrepPro, daily show prep for radio — every item sourced twice, in big type for the air, with an archive built in. It needs your station’s stream address, which lives on your account page, and nothing else.