Editing Bing Crosby (section)

===Role in early tape recording===
[[File:Bing Crosby Billboard 3.jpg|upright|thumb|Crosby in 1943]]

During the [[Golden Age of Radio]], performers had to create their shows live, sometimes even redoing the program a second time for the West Coast time zone. Crosby had to do two live radio shows on the same day, three hours apart, for the East and West Coasts.<ref name=RW>{{cite magazine |author=Careless, James |title=The Ever-Evolving Role of Airchecks |magazine=Radio World |date=May 22, 2019 |volume=43 |number=13 |page=18}}</ref> Crosby's radio career took a significant turn in 1945, when he clashed with NBC over his insistence that he be allowed to pre-record his radio shows. The live production of radio shows was reinforced by the musicians' union and [[ASCAP]], which wanted to ensure continued work for their members. In ''On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio'', John Dunning wrote about German engineers having developed a tape recorder with a near-professional broadcast quality standard:
{{Blockquote|Suddenly Crosby saw an enormous advantage in prerecording his radio shows. The scheduling could now be done at the star's convenience. He could do four shows a week, if he chose, and then take a month off. But the networks and sponsors were adamantly opposed. The public wouldn't stand for 'canned' radio, the networks argued. There was something magic for listeners in the fact that what they were hearing was being performed, and heard live everywhere, at that precise instant. Some of the best moments in comedy came when a line was blown and the star had to rely on wit to rescue a bad situation. Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Phil Harris, and, yes, Crosby were masters at this, and the networks weren't about to give it up easily.}}<ref name="Dunning">{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Fi5wPDBiGfMC&dq=%22Suddenly+Crosby+saw%22&pg=PA93 |last1=Dunning |first1=John| title=On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio |section=The Bing Crosby Show |date=1998 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York, NY |isbn=978-0-19-507678-3 |pages=89–94 |edition=Revised |access-date=2024-12-29}}</ref>

Crosby's insistence eventually factored into the further development of [[magnetic tape sound recording]] and the radio industry's widespread adoption of it.<ref>Hammar, Peter. Jack Mullin: The man and his Machines. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 37 (6): 490–496, 498, 500, 502, 504, 506, 508, 510, 512; June 1989.</ref><ref>An Afternoon with Jack Mullin. NTSC VHS tape, 1989 AES.</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_tape.htm |title=''History of Magnetic tape'', section: "Enter Bing Crosby" |access-date=March 22, 2017 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040603153341/http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_tape.htm |archive-date=June 3, 2004}}</ref> He used his clout, both professionally and financially, for innovations in audio. But NBC and CBS refused to broadcast prerecorded radio programs. Crosby left the network and remained off the air for seven months, creating a legal battle with his sponsor [[Kraft Foods|Kraft]] that was settled out of court. Crosby returned to broadcasting for the last 13 weeks of the 1945–1946 season.

The Mutual Network, on the other hand, pre-recorded some of its programs as early as 1938 for ''[[The Shadow]]'' with [[Orson Welles]]. ABC was formed from the sale of the [[NBC Blue Network]] in 1943 after a federal [[antitrust]] suit and was willing to join Mutual in breaking the tradition. ABC offered Crosby $30,000 per week to produce a recorded show every Wednesday that would be sponsored by [[Philco]]. He would get an additional $40,000 from 400 independent stations for the rights to broadcast the 30-minute show, which was sent to them every Monday on three {{convert|16|in|cm|adj=on}} [[lacquer disc]]s that played ten minutes per side at {{sfrac|33|1|3}} rpm.

Murdo MacKenzie of Bing Crosby Enterprises had seen a demonstration of the German [[Magnetophon]] in June 1947—the same device that [[Jack Mullin]] had brought back from Radio Frankfurt with 50 reels of tape, at the end of the war. It was one of the magnetic tape recorders that BASF and AEG had built in Germany starting in 1935. The 6.5&nbsp;mm ferric-oxide-coated tape could record 20 minutes per reel of high-quality sound. [[Alexander M. Poniatoff]] ordered [[Ampex]], which he founded in 1944, to manufacture an improved version of the Magnetophone.

Crosby hired Mullin to start recording his ''Philco Radio Time'' show on his German-made machine in August 1947 using the same 50 reels of I.G. Farben magnetic tape that Mullin had found at a radio station at [[Bad Nauheim]] near Frankfurt while working for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The advantage was editing. As Crosby wrote in his autobiography:
{{Blockquote|By using tape, I could do a thirty-five- or forty-minute show, then edit it down to the twenty-six or twenty-seven minutes the program ran. In that way, we could take out jokes, gags, or situations that didn't play well and finish with only the prime meat of the show; the solid stuff that played big. We could also take out the songs that didn't sound good. It gave us a chance to first try a recording of the songs in the afternoon without an audience, then another one in front of a studio audience. We'd dub the one that came off best into the final transcription. It gave us a chance to ad-lib as much as we wanted, knowing that excess ad-libbing could be sliced from the final product. If I made a mistake in singing a song or in the script, I could have some fun with it, then retain any of the fun that sounded amusing.}}

Mullin's 1976 memoir of these early days of experimental recording agrees with Crosby's account:
{{Blockquote|In the evening, Crosby did the whole show before an audience. If he muffed a song then, the audience loved it—thought it was very funny—but we would have to take out the show version and put in one of the rehearsal takes. Sometimes, if Crosby was having fun with a song and not really working at it, we had to make it up out of two or three parts. This ad-lib way of working is commonplace in the recording studios today, but it was all new to us.}}

Crosby invested $50,000 in Ampex with the intent to produce more machines.<ref name="Sterling, C. H. 1990"/> In 1948, the second season of Philco shows was recorded with the Ampex Model 200A and Scotch 111 tape from [[3M]].<ref name=RW/> Mullin explained how one new broadcasting technique was invented on the Crosby show with these machines:

{{Blockquote|One time Bob Burns, the hillbilly comic, was on the show, and he threw in a few of his folksy farm stories, which of course were not in Bill Morrow's script. Today they wouldn't seem very off-color, but things were different on radio then. They got enormous laughs, which just went on and on. We couldn't use the jokes, but Bill asked us to save the laughs. A couple of weeks later he had a show that wasn't very funny, and he insisted that we put in the salvaged laughs. Thus the laugh-track was born.}}

Crosby started the tape recorder revolution in America. In his 1950 film ''[[Mr. Music]]'', Crosby is seen singing into an Ampex tape recorder that reproduced his voice better than anything else. Also quick to adopt tape recording was his friend Bob Hope. Crosby gave one of the first Ampex Model 300 recorders to his friend, guitarist [[Les Paul]], which led to Paul's invention of [[multitrack recording]]. His organization, the Crosby Research Foundation, held tape recording patents and developed equipment and recording techniques such as the [[laugh track]] that are still in use.<ref name="Sterling, C. H. 1990">Sterling, C. H., & Kittross, J. M. (1990). Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American broadcasting (2nd ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth.</ref>

With Frank Sinatra, Crosby was one of the principal backers for the [[United Western Recorders]] studio complex in Los Angeles.<ref name="CoganClark2003">{{cite book |last1=Cogan |first1=Jim |last2=Clark |first2=William |title=Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hO-KQ4o_B2MC |access-date=July 4, 2018 |year=2003 |publisher=Chronicle Books |isbn=978-0-8118-3394-3}}</ref>