How to cut your aircheck reel in Riano Studio

A program director opens your aircheck between two other things. If the first minute doesn’t land, there isn’t a second one. Everything about cutting a reel comes back to that: short, tight, and the best thing first.

The work used to be the problem. Find the files, open an audio editor, hunt for where each break starts, chop the music, stitch it together, export, upload. Most hosts never finish. Riano Studio does it inside ShowPrepPro, from clips that are already there, and as of today it works one clip at a time, which is how an editor should feel.

Here’s how to cut a good one.

Before you start: what a PD wants to hear

Every PD has their own taste, but the advice you’ll hear from most of them is the same:

• Short. Three to five minutes for the whole thing is plenty. Nobody has ever been turned down for sending too little.
• Talk, not music. Cut the songs down to a second or two either side of you, or out entirely. They’re listening to you.
• Best first. Lead with the break you’d play if you only got to play one.
• Range. Something funny, something warm, something tight. A reel of five versions of the same bit tells them you have one bit.
• Recent. What you sound like this month, not three jobs ago. Older work has its own place (see the end of this post).

1. Mark the good ones as you go

You don’t build a reel in one sitting. You notice good breaks over a couple of weeks and collect them.

Every clip in ShowPrepPro has a + Reel button: on Recordings and each show in your Body of Work, and on a break’s own page. When you hear one land, press it. The clip keeps playing. That’s the whole habit.

2. Open Riano Studio and work down the tray

Open Riano Studio. Everything you marked is waiting at the top under Ready for your aircheck, in the order you marked it.

Press Trim them one by one. The first clip opens in the editor across the full width of the screen, already trimmed to the talk around your break, so you’re tightening it rather than hunting for the start.

3. Trim each clip tight

This is where reels are won. Every clip gets the same three questions: where does it really start, where does it really end, and is there anything in the middle a PD doesn’t need?

• Drag the handles at either end of the waveform to set the start and end.
• Nudge either edge by a tenth of a second or a full second with the buttons underneath. A tenth is the difference between a clean start and a clipped breath.
• Zoom in for the fine work. Start and End jump you in close on either edge, + and − stretch the picture without touching the audio, and Fit shows the whole clip again. Pinch, or Ctrl and the mouse wheel, works on the waveform too.
• Listen to the edges. Hear the start and Hear the end play the first and last three seconds. That’s where the problems are: the tail of a song, a mic that opened a beat early, a “so, uh” before you found the line.
• Set it while you listen. Press Play, and when you hear the moment, press Set start here or Set end here. On a keyboard, I and O do the same.

When it’s right, press Add to the reel. The next clip from your tray opens by itself. Trim, add, trim, add, until the tray is done.

4. Arrange the reel

Under the editor, The reel lists every clip in order with its length.

• Move to start puts your best break first. Do this one.
• ↑ and ↓ move a clip one place.
• ▶ plays just that piece.
• Edit sends a clip back to the editor for another trim. It keeps its place.
• Remove takes it off the reel. The clip itself is untouched.

Then press Play the reel and listen to the whole thing straight through, the way a PD will. The joins are softened for you, so clips run into each other cleanly.

Be honest on that listen. If you drift during a break, so will they. Take it out. A three-minute reel with no dull moment beats a five-minute one with a single dull moment.

5. Name it, save it, send it

Give it a name you’ll recognize (“Mornings, fall 2026” works) and press Save to my reels. Your reel in progress is kept as you go, so a closed tab or a reload won’t lose your work before then.

Then send it:

• On your page. Go to My Page and feature the reel. It plays at the top of showpreppro.com/@yourname, with your photo, your résumé and a contact form that never shows your email address.
• A private link. If it’s for one PD, make a private link instead. It plays for whoever has it and stops working the moment you turn it off.
• The file. Download gives you one M4A that plays on any phone, for the times somebody asks for an attachment.

Your older work

The breaks from your last station, or your best year, belong somewhere too. Upload them under My Page → Past work. They get their own section on your page, and they show up in Riano Studio under Past work, so you can cut the best minute of an old aircheck into the same reel as last week’s.

One thing worth saying plainly: an aircheck is your station’s broadcast. Publish talk, not songs, and make sure your station is OK with it before it goes on a public page.

ShowPrepPro is $19 a month, and you can try all of it free for 14 days.