Published every
Friday
by usb memory stick
and

On-line here now

Who we are!
 

Every Friday afternoon at about 3pm the process of producing the weekly audio news recording begins.
The Leader of the week’s Editing Team will have collected  four copies of the Mercury newspaper from its office before going to meet at the studio with the other editors who - working on their special topics -  read, select, cut-out and paste the selected articles on to paper pages for the readers to read.
This is usually completed by 5pm.

Photos of two of our editing teams.

The sorting.

The sacks of the previous week’s yellow pouches, containing the returned usb memory sticks, are collected at about 4.30pm. from the Royal Mail sorting office in Great Yarmouth and taken to the Grapevine studio.

The admin team of four arrives at about this time and opens each returned pouche, removing the usb stick, changing the address label, and recording in the log book the return from that listener. A  check is also made to see if a message or letter from the listener has been included.  The usb memory sticks are checked and sorted, and prepared for the engineers to use again.

The "Live broadcast.

There are usually four readers, and they arrive at about 5.40pm together with the Presenter who is leading for that week. The readings are allocated and checked.

The engineers will also have arrived and have set up the computer to make the digital recording which is used for the new usb memory sticks and also for the web site and the podcast. As we are still sending out a few cassettes, the recording heads on the recorders and the copiers have to be cleaned and prepared.

The one hour session starts at six o'clock.  It is recorded "live", with a short break at the half-way point. Re-starts are only made if a major engineering fault occurs; the session is not edited after recording.

  It is in essence a "live" broadcast.

The final check before we post!

The "old method" - testing the cassettes - 250 of them!.
We do not yet have a photo of the new
usb sticks being tested.

When the recording is completed the engineers set about converting it to mp3 format for use on the usb sticks.

The usb sticks which are sent out are produced on two digital machines which make high speed copies of the recording from a master.

These sticks are checked and then put into the yellow pouches which are taken on Friday evening to the Royal Mail for delivery to our listeners on Saturday morning.

The mp3 recording is also used for uploading  to our web site where it can be listened to on-line, or downloaded. 

It is usually available on-line by 9pm.

 
To summarize, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon nothing is ready, but by 8.30 the new recording is on its way to the listeners.    

We think that is “not a bad effort!”

Our Weekly Web Audio Edition

Why not access the weekly Grapevine edition on the web?

 Consider the advantages:   Access to the week’s recording at any time from 9pm on Friday evening, through to  midnight on the following Thursday.   And even then, you can still go to our on-line archive and listen on-line, or download, a recording for five weeks.  Yes, for five weeks the recordings are kept in our on-line archive with immediate access.

You can listen or download either the full one hour edition, or you can select which of the four sections, we call them tracks, you particularly want to hear

We offer you four different methods of listening, firstly:

Using an easy player which operates by your keyboard – this was especially designed to be easy to use; it was designed by Shaun who is blind and understands what is helpful for blind listeners.

Or you can download to your computer the part or parts of the recording which you particularly want, so as to listen to them without spending time on line.

There is a page with “buttons” to click if you are partially sighted and prefer that method of control.

And if you are into podcasting, then we have it set up for you!

And on top of all that, there are four news pages, unfortunately in text only, three of them with up-to-date news from the Yarmouth Mercury and the Eastern Daily Press, and a "What's On" page with the latest activities dates from the Yarmouth Mercury.

We hope that you find the facilities on our web editions helpful.

If you have a computer, then we urge you to log on with the link below, and listen.

Go direct to Grapevine's Easy Player for the week's recording.

Our recent developments.

You may have heard that cassette usage is being phased out by the audio industry and we have therefore had to look to the future. We considered changing to cds but the weekly cost would have been too great.  We also had to consider the rapidly increasing cost of serving our bank of cassette tape copiers
 
  After much discussion, we  decided to plan for a change from cassettes to usb memory sticks, and aiming to complete the change  by  the end of 2010 - maybe even earlier!  These usb memory sticks would be sent out in the same manner as cassettes.  The usb sticks would require a "player",  and after obtaining generous sponsorship, we found that we would be able to give a "player"  to each member of Grapevine.
 
  To get everything moving we visited listeners to deliver the players, to explain how they work, and to answer questions.  We are very pleased to report that listeners have been pleased with the change, and that they are impressed with the great improvement in the sound quality. 

We are even more pleased to tell you that the change has been carried out well ahead of time.

A really big "Thank you" to those who have sponsored us with that important encouragement - cash! 

And a big "thank you" to the Grapevine volunteers who have given a lot of time, in so many different ways, to enable us to make this major change.

  May 2010.  

 

Contact Us at Grapevine with your comments, news and great ideas.