Tools

GLITS and BLITS are two broadcast-standard test tone sequences that most audio engineers have encountered but few have had a convenient way to generate from scratch. GLITS - Group Line-up and Identification Tone Sequence - is the BBC/EBU stereo alignment standard. It runs as a 4-second cycle of 1 kHz tone at -18 dBFS on both channels, with timed interruptions on each channel in turn to identify left and right. It is the tone you hear at the top of a contribution feed or at the start of a tape, and it tells you the line is up, the levels are correct, and the channels are the right way round. ...

Anyone who manages a fleet of Comrex contribution codecs will know the problem. You have ACCESS MultiRack units in a broadcast centre, BRIC-Link devices at remote sites, ACCESS Portable NX units in the field - and keeping track of which ones are online, which are connected, and which have silently gone offline is a constant background task. Checking them individually through Switchboard is fine for one or two units. At scale it becomes friction. ...

Broadcast audio engineering has always involved a degree of systems thinking. Routing matrices, gain structures, signal flow - these are disciplines built around understanding how components interact and what happens when something changes. Software-defined workflows extend that thinking into a new domain, and with it comes a new category of things that can go wrong: a script that worked last week stops working, a configuration change breaks something, a colleague overwrites your work. ...

When planning temporary WAN services for major sports events, one question comes up again and again: how much bandwidth do our Ravenna audio streams need? Fibre connectivity is expensive, and over‑provisioning costs money. For years I used a basic Excel spreadsheet to estimate bandwidth — it worked, but it was slow to update, hard to share, and far from elegant. So I built something better. RavennaCalc is a clean, browser‑based bandwidth calculator for Ravenna/AES67 streams. It’s open‑source, takes seconds to use, and gives reliable estimates without the spreadsheet overhead. ...