How to monitor RW radio (as it craps on your reps and ideals), while listening to music!

[certainot]

Last edited Tue May 20, 2014, 12:34 AM - Edit history (1)

Now it's possible to monitor the radio propaganda in the state or national discourse without actually hanging by the radio.

I found a combination of software that makes it possible to preschedule the recording of multiple talk radio streams at once and transcribe them with accuracy that will allow searches for key content and patterns.

A Mac running Snow Leopard OS or later and about $200 -$250 in software will enable a volunteer in every state democratic headquarters to search transcripts at the end of the day or week to know what's being aimed at Democrats from those think tanks mouthpieces.

My previous diary demonstrated how Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and his staff depended on talk radio in 2010.

It's happening in every state, free and without consequence for Republicans. You can buy a lot of TV ads with that Koch money, but to sell big lies you have to, as George Bush said, "keep repeating things over and over and over again, for the truth to sink in. You gotta catapult the propaganda."

SOFTWARE

Here's what I found out with the software. This is just for Mac and I didn't keep looking much after I found these two elements, which I'm still learning.

Snowtape is a simple app for about $30 that allows you to schedule your computer to simultaneously record multiple radio streams at the same time. Snowtape can separate ads from other content to some extent. There are a few tricks involved that I will explain below.

I got Macspeech Scribe for my slightly outdated 2011 Mac. It costs about $150 and allows you to train up to six voice profiles. Vocabulary can also be trained for better accuracy with particular names, organizations, and issues and words can be added or deleted. Note: Macspeech Scribe does not work on the new Mac Mavericks OS.

Dragon Dictate costs about $200 and may be the only option for the new Mac OS. I believe they also have a PC version. Dragon Dictate allows more voice profiles than Macspeech Scribe and may be better overall.

Most talk shows include guests, other staff voices, and ad voices, so it's a bit mixed up. And you have to actually enunciate punctuation so Macspeech runs all sentences together. Faster talkers who run words together are harder to get right. And it will make guesses that make no sense. It ain't perfect but training helps.

Don't spend the money if you're expecting error free transcription. Slow clear speech with no background noise provides good results but there are other factors. Here's an example from earlier this week from odious Wisconsin talker Vicki McKenna. The voice profile got minimal training and she slurs and talks fast a lot:

can you believe this. Not the Soros funded democracy alliance to buy into the democracy alliance you need to pay $250,000 and then pay $25,000 every single year democracy will I answer a bunch of billionaires who get together and they find various different left-wing dark money groups and yet you've got the same people who claim that it's okay for the John Doe to go forward because we're worried about dark money nevermind again this whole problem with the constitute should the same people who are reading me millions of dollars in dark money they don't want the other side to have dark money dark money money just means money that is not disclosed the Milwaukee County Board overrode Tracy believes the top of the other referendum that it is the move to ammend referendum the County Board at the past of dark money groups like democracy alliance and the Center for media and democracy and in the liberty tree alliance and a whole host of other anonymously funded left-wing organizations under the Soros umbrella overrode a Belize beat so on a advisory referendum to amend the First Amendment to make it illegal to speak to effect political change if your company why because

The transcriptions are more useful for identifying patterns and points of interest for further study with the original recordings. When they use words and phrases like Clinton, or Walker, 'minimum wage' or 'Move To Amend' (yes they're talking about it), the context is clear.

If there are more than 6 talkers to transcribe some may have similar voices and styles so the same profile might be used for more than one talker. It may be possible to export/share trained voice profiles- that could save some time and trouble. They do show up as files and can be deleted and replaced in Macspeech.

Modern Macs that can run Mavericks OS can load a free transcription software from Apple. I don't think it's trainable but it might work adequately for some talkers.

HOW TO RECORD AND TRANSCRIBE RADIO STREAMS

In the near future I hope to explain this process and improvements at a yet to be published site (probably the blip.org - for the big lie project).

Here's a list, with links, of top talk radio shows: Top Talk Radio

There are a few tricks to getting the right stream that Snowtape can record and into a sound file Macspeech can use.

Many radio stations seem to channel through services like Iheart Radio, that Swnowtape can't record for some reason someone else may be able to explain. There may be better ways but I do this:

TO RECORD

1) Plug the call letters of the station into the Radio Locator and search (that also give signal coverage map).

2) Ciick on the stream they give and that should open iTunes.

3) In iTunes click on Get Info in the File menu and then click on Edit URL. Copy that URL.

4) Open Snowtape, and it should show up in the field if you click on Import URL under the File menu. Then Snowtape can record it.

TO TRANSCRIBE

1) In Snowtape Preferences go to Exporting and choose the AAC format.

2) Select files to translate and in the Snowtape Action menu choose Export to iTunes. Those files will be placed in a Snowtape file as M4A files that Macspeech can use.

3) Then drag them from iTunes to your RW TALK RADIO SUCKS or REPUBLICANS LIE folder in Finder and you then should be able to open them with Macspeech, which apparently only works with M4A and AAC files.

I imagine there are easier ways. Even better, maybe someone could come up with a fully automated easy-to-use software combo for all those Democratic Party election headquarters!

WavePad (free) can help edit/trim voice files and slow the faster talkers down for greater accuracy although I'm not yet sure how much it helps because Macspeech may automatically do the same or similar. I have to experiment some more.

And if you want to convert audio files to various formats I found Switch (free).

ELECTION 2014

The planet can't afford 2 more years of obstruction. We waste too much time with talk radio manufactured distractions like Benghazi. GOP/ALEC think tanks are already using those giant megaphones to sell their candidates and attack and lie about their Democratic opponents.

Every important election and issue will be distorted and lied about regularly from those radio stations until November 2014. Your candidates will be attacked. Your issues will be distorted. Your protests and fellow protestors will be demonized. RW radio will effect Democratic primaries to favor blue dogs, or whoever will support that bloody KXL pipeline, if advantageous for them.

Every state Democratic headquarters, every Democratic candidate, and every progressive organization with stakes in the 2014 election could spend a few hundred bucks and volunteer hours to finally end this major Republican advantage.

Take the evidence to the local/state/national media so they will know where the lies are coming from. Let the media and the politicians who repeat and give credibility to the talking points know where it's coming from, and that the screaming outraged callers and writers are illegitimate made-to-order billionaire constituencies full of talk radio crap.

When the town hall meetings or the vote recounts are overrun by dittohead/ teabaggers yelling the same talking points it is important to publicize where they got their marching orders. Media will be less likely to credit them as 'popular sentiment'.

How many 2014 elections will be won by those 450 carnival barkers sitting behind call screeners in the loudest radio stations in the country? How many volunteer hours and small donations will they negate because liberals ignore them? How much more anti-democratic lunacy will they enable with their unchallenged repetition?

COPYRIGHT PROBLEMS?

I don't know what the copyright limitations are relative to a public display of the word soup spewing from all those stations but if the Democratic Party kept it in house that shouldn't be a problem- right?

Can all that word soup be published on line in some form so that it can be searched by anyone? Can the recorded files be made available online for public reference? How accurate do the transcripts have to be to constitute copyright infringement?

Any copyright lawyers out there?

[dreamnightwind]

1. Awesome

Great to see this effort, it's an excellent idea and I love it when DU members do something to fix things rather than simply complaining on here.

I will check in later, busy at the moment, but I might be able to help. I have a Windows PC and an Android phone, not a good match for this approach. Also an older iPod Touch. Anyway I have some pretty good programming skills, have some experience writing code to flow processed data to the web, that might be useful, also I have some time. Probably some other people on here have experience doing this for Mac.

Whether you need my help or not, congratulations and I hope you get somewhere with this.

[certainot]

2. thanks. maybe there's a good alternative to snowtape, for PC.

the ability to make the results publicly accessible on a national or state by state level would help to spread the work but i haven't had any feedback on copyright restrictions and have no idea myself.

right now i'm experimenting.

there would be a lot of time involved unless there's some 'automation'. and i haven't found out if audio files can be transcribed more than one at a time- doesn't look like it in macspeech scribe.

whether or not there are copyright problems, someone with the ability and computing/storage power to gather and store the results of 5 months of recording and transcribing might be able to make it pay for itself. the political consultants are starting to get rich but they have no way to access/analyze that aspect of the GOP messaging juggernaut without just making guesses, and that doesn't seem to have worked well for democrats in the past.

for one thing, for example, in upcoming debates the GOP candidates will be quoting the talk radio gods and for their opponents and media to be able to point that out could be very useful.

there's a lot happening on the local talk radio level already.

at the very least i would hope the state democratic party organizations would get something going along these lines.

[certainot]

3. just got a good suggestion

dragon says audio files can't be cued up for automated transcription but files could be combined into one... i could have figured that out eventually....

[dreamnightwind]

4. I will also look into this

I've done a lot of automation coding, taking readings from environmental sensors and flowing their results to the web, might be helpful.

It shouldn't be too difficult to automate the transcription and/or indexing of audio files. Will need to do a little googling to see. If there's no other way I suppose combining files could get it done, but I'm pretty sure an app or web service could sit there spinning its wheels waiting for an external notification of a file to process, wake up to do the job and then wait for the next file, have done this kind of thing many times though it's been a few years.

We can take this to private messages if you like, or leave it here, I don't care either way, maybe somebody else will jump in with advice. Anyway you are on an interesting track, I think it could help combat the RW talk radio B.S. Need to look closely at the intended users of this and what their needs would be.

[certainot]

6. thanks. i'd be interested in any input like that.

the copyright aspect is still a question for public usage but anything to help automate the process would make it more appealing to an individual candidate's office/volunteers, or a state party HQ for instance and that could be useful without publicizing.

i am using some spare time to put up a simple web site at theblip.org- not sure when it will be there, that i can refer dems and other to.

i need to do a better job of checking inbox at DU.

[Tsiyu]

5. Nice work

K&R