December 31, 2019

In going back to listen where I left off in Chandu the Magician, I discovered that "Aug 24, 1948: Letter Arrives" was a duplicate of the previous episode and thus the correct episode audio was missing. I went through my collections and to the internet archive to see if anyone had this correct and everyone has the same duplicate error. So I went to the reels and found the missing episode on reel #5 made in 1971, (back when I was still in di-a-pers). The tape condition was remarkably good and the audio is very acceptable. I'm going to try to share this back to the archive.org if I can find a way to contact the right person.

For anyone who has this collection with this duplicate problem, here's the missing episode.

December 22, 2019

I'm calling Superman done. Finally! Over a year after I started from the reels and having listened to the whole series and wrapping around to listen to 2/3 of it again and redoing the digital restoration on hundreds to get everything to the best quality, I'm pretty satisfied with it now. The total from reels is now 773. I've put the mp3s up for sale as both a download and as a flash drive. Desktop users see here. Mobile here. I'm not sure if anyone has put this much time and care into it since they were being transferred from ETs years ago. Regardless, I know that this quality is very uncommon. After a year of only listening to Superman every night, I get to choose something else.

November 22, 2019

I just completed an audit with additions to Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. I added 20 episodes and used 18 from reels for a total of 47. The program had a long run from 1944 to 1954 with over 500 episodes broadcast. Unfortunately, very few exist today. The early episodes had a distinction in the writing from other detective shows but it later became more like other detective shows.

September 24, 2019

Just completed a full audit of Boston Blackie. Although we went from 154 down to 134 episodes, 28 were new or upgraded from 3 reels and 47 from another high-quality source and nearly all of them were audio edited, retitled and renumbered. Boston Blackie is a quick-witted fun program with plenty of characters.

I'm also adding more episodes to Superman by including episodes from mostly complete stories that I've determined are still enjoyable, especially now with the improved audio quality from the reels. And I've added 10 episodes of Up For Parole to Police Stories

September 9-10, 2019

The 9 year-old Mac has frozen a couple times this year apparently due to graphics. It's been cleaned-out not too long ago. Since it happened a couple days ago, I setup Silence Sensor in my software Radiologik Scheduler to text me from my remotely hosted Mac in Las Vegas when there's a problem so I can catch it much sooner hopefully.

Added just 26 episodes of Johnny Dollar to Detective. This series is very challenging for good quality. More coming but perhaps slowly. Also replaced 19 158 episodes of Superman as I've been listening to the entire series at bedtime way ahead of when it airs and found some more that I thought I must have better on reels and I did. The total from reels for Superman is now 668 of the 1,048.

August 23, 2019

Power outages are unusual here. Today we had the power go on and off at least 5 times with a total outage of about a half hour. Fortunately the UPS kept everything up and there was no interruption to the station

I'm working on the Bob Bailey years of Your Truly, Johnny Dollar. This is one I haven't done before because some are 5-part 15 minute stories and the rest are 30 minute standalone episodes. One way or another I'll find a way to introduce at least some of this to the station in the coming days.

April 30, 2019

After 3 weeks of part-time work, I just completed an audit of Nick Carter, Master Detective taking it from 74 to 89 episodes with 48 upgrades or additions and edits to nearly all of them.

We are nearing the 74th anniversary of VE Day. The April 30, 1945 Sherlock Holmes refers to this since this was the day Hitler committed suicide during the Battle of Berlin.

April 13, 2019

If you were getting weird results from the webpage earlier today, it was the growing pains of moving radio.macinmind.com to secure https from http. I didn't do this for years because I didn't think it was important for a site like this with no login but the browsers are now making the fact that it is "not secure" more and more prominent. Supposedly search rankings are lower for non-secure sites. But I also read that https can be considerably faster so all those things combined was enough impetus. Even though streams can also be secure now, I see absolutely no need for it.

March 30, 2019

Sherlock Holmes got a full audit with editing and cleanup to most episodes new and existing. The total went down from 144 to 123 but we did get 42 upgrades or new. Sherlock Holmes has been played by many different actors over the years. The ABN collection is mostly the years 1945-1948 with Basil Rathbone, Tom Conway, and John Stanley as Holmes with Nigel Bruce and Alfred Shirley as Watson

Over the past 2 years, more than 8,000 shows are new or upgraded. About 1,000 of those are from reels I've digitized.

March 23, 2019

Philo Vance got upgraded with replacements or additions taking us from 59 to 85 episodes. Every episode got individual cleanup attention. Now with the excellent audio quality, these sometimes fun detective stories are much more enjoyable if you can make it past the shrill organ music.

March 15, 2019

Gunsmoke got 143 upgrades and 52 additions making a total of 329 of which 307 were edited for time, noise reduction and general audio quality. The vast majority of these are excellent audio quality but I stretched it a little bit to try to include the greatest number of episodes. Where there are repeats, I only included them if the audio quality was as good or better. But quite a few had to be excluded because they run under 20 minutes.

Start listening to any Gunsmoke episode and you'll be captivated, even if you don't think you like Westerns. Many listeners have expressed that this is the only Western they want to hear. The first of this upgraded collection plays Sunday at 8AM and 5PM.

March 8, 2019

Lux Radio Theatre just got 188 additions or upgrades, a few removals, and a lot of time corrections, edits and noise reduction to both the incoming upgrades and the existing giving us 376 good playable episodes after about 60 hours of work. The last time I audited this collection was probably 10 years ago. Even with that amount of work and having opened many of these audio files, it's still possible there might be some odd audio I missed but I know it is far better than it was. I also added the featured stars in the titles for the whole collection.

Lux Radio Theatre often remakes Hollywood movies for radio using the original stars when they are available. Its pace is different from so much of the rest of OTR due to the use of an hour to tell the story. You might hear something here you like and decide to go find the original motion picture later.

February 14, 2019

Added 54 episodes of a new program to Mystery/Thriller, The Chase. The first one airs midnight Feb 15.

January 9, 2019

Did a full audit of Abbott and Costello. We went from 80 to 120 episodes with 96 replacements or additions, 36 of which came from the ABN reels. All of these skits are as good if not better than the famous "Who's on First?". The only criticism of this show is the contrived laughter at the beginning in the earlier years. In one episode I can hear someone say something like "Remember to give a really hearty laugh". The audience is compelled to give fake laughter to start the show. But the whole shows are really good humor with a lot of word play, a bit of improvisation from the script, and dialogue that is sometimes suggestive but with a lot of class.

Once I'm done with Superman, two big upcoming projects are Hallmark Playhouse and Challenge of the Yukon. With Challenge of the Yukon, my original collection from a regular OTR dealer has a lot of mp3 hiccups so I haven't played it in years. I've already digitized 12 reels of this but need to do the work of making mp3 episodes out of it. With Hallmark Playhouse I have 2 collections to merge, one of which being from 13 reels which still need to be digitized. Both will be big new additions.

January 5, 2019

Added 64 Space Patrol to Science Fiction for a total of 96 episodes with many upgrades. Added 39 Academy Award Theater as a new program to Matinee Theater. Added 102 Have Gun, Will Travel as a new program to Frontier Stories. Added 8 Macabre as a new program to Mystery/Thriller. 520 Superman are now done from reels.

December 22, 2018

So far I have digitized and prepared about 400 Superman episodes from the reels. It's amazing how much better these are than what's in general circulation, not all, but a whole lot. I also did a full audit of Ozzie and Harriet adding 21 from reels 12 from other new sources. But the total number of episodes went down after this audit due to having to remove many poor quality episodes. This is one tough program to find. Burns and Allen is another I'm struggling with. Apparently not many of these two comedies survived.

No support anywhere could figure this out. But I figured out why the Amazon Kindle Fire, at least the 5th Gen Fire OS 5.3.6.4 (626533320), will not play the station in any app including Silk and TuneIn. Apparently the Kindle Fire OS is blocking port 8000. I've notified Amazon and I'm looking for a workaround. It's not reasonable to change ports and go through the whole process of re-advertising a new server address again. That was weeks of work. Amazon needs to fix this. As you can imagine, even when I figure it out for them, I must jump through all the hoops of support to report it which took about 3 hours. Maybe... just maybe, something will happen.

Update: I created a workaround for the Kindle Fire but it will only work to play the stream from this site. It required a javascript decider to send Silk through a web proxy to get around the port 8000 block Amazon created.

November 29, 2018

I've begun digitizing 45 Superman reels with 24-28 episodes each and the results are most episodes are terrific quality improvements. I started with episodes at the position we are broadcasting in this serial and I'm working my way forward and then around. That means you will only hear the best available with the reels included when they are better. So far I have over 10% of all Superman upgraded.

I will end the old server in less than a week. I don't know what else I can do to get the last 25-30% moved over. I've been running audio announcements and notified all directories I can. I most recently notified vTuner and they are now moved over although they insist on keeping the AM 1710 art of years ago even after I provided them new art. Some directories have had trouble understanding my concise English that I'm replacing and not adding a server so it's been a lot of work getting them to do it right. And although I found a form to try to submit the new server address to Apple's iTunes "Internet Radio" directory, they still write back that they don't allow any modifications so I suppose they'll just leave an old AM 1710 in their directory that won't work. Nothing I can do for that. That's the level of quality they insist on. iTunes users just add it yourself--File menu, Open Stream, http://radio.macinmind.com/listen.m3u and put it in a playlist to find easily.

November 15-22, 2018

Nov 22: Everything should be resolved. AT&T did maintenance, I replaced the router, and a new streaming server was added. The audio source programming is still the old Mac mini from 2010 which continues to work perfectly. The old streaming server will be discontinued very soon. Everywhere I have control I've updated all references to point to the new server and advised all directories that I can find of the new address. This includes the web player, mobile, TuneIn, onlineradiobox, Streema (simple radio), Grace Digital, and icecast's own directory. I can't update the listing in iTunes directory because Apple won't allow it so you'll need to manually add the address to iTunes (File menu-Open Stream) or anywhere else it has been manually entered. http://radio.macinmind.com/listen.m3u will always point too the right place. New streaming service is less expensive so expenses next year will be less than this year.

Nov 18: Added new server and set web player, mobile, and links on pages to point to this new server. Mobile page may need a reload.

Nov 16: Resetting everything with the connection at 6PM.

Nov 15: There have been interruptions to the internet connection several times per day for the past week. Some are short enough to not be noticeable but many are disconnecting everyone now. AT&T is visiting today. Switched to backup network until resolved, hopefully later today.

October 31, 2018

Replaced a couple dozen Mysterious Traveler. Did a full audit to The Aldrich Family adding many. Added The Anderson Family (not to be confused with Father Knows Best). And replaced a few other miscellaneous. I slowed my pace on the reels but will get back to it during the winter. The TEAC 4070G reel-to-reel I picked-up at hamfest is mostly restored but still needs an alignment and speed adjustment.

September 7, 2018

Using 14 reels got 122 additions or replacements with 38 from other sources taking us from 59 to 160 episodes of Let George Do It. Only 3 episodes didn't get replaced. The main reason for such a large amount of replacement is because the most common mp3s of this in circulation were done I think in 1999 and 2000 and they were encoded poorly with hiccups or audio drops every few seconds. Being that I'm one of the few to go back to analog to retrieve this, at minimum we got the same fidelity without glitches but mostly exceeded it when you look at how many new airable we got out of that.

Also, using 9 reels got 8 replacements and 16 new to Broadway Is My Beat and using 8 reels got 47 replacements and 12 new for This Is Your FBI.

I will begin indicating which shows are taken from these reels with either a tiny reel icon or this: o_o = from ABN reels.

Chandu, the Magician replaces Marco Polo on Sunday serials

August 30 2018

What an experience to get material that's been all analog up to me. There's a lot on reels that is poor or unusable, but it's worth it for that fraction that gives us sometimes very uncommon quality. I've digitized 57 reels so far--45 from the Ohio collection which is just over 2% of it.

Made very significant improvements to X Minus One, getting 18 upgrades from the reels and other upgrades from other sources for 129 playable. The Life of Riley got a full merge/audit with 83 upgrades or new from reels, 18 from other sources for 195 playable. Father Knows Best got 26 upgrades or new from reels and many others from other sources for 105 playable.

August 23, 2018

After fighting with issues with the 50 year-old Sony Deck and not being able to get the AKAI to run at all yet, I decided to purchase a fully-serviced reel deck from the 80's--a TEAC X-300. These fully-serviced decks can be very expensive but since I can do without pro features and auto-reverse, I did okay with this. In side-by-side recording tests against the Sony, the speed is more correct on the TEAC and the background hiss is less. And it runs nearly silently on my desk beside me. I knew I had to do this in order to get through this mass number of reels. I've included the cost of this in the amount needed for 2018.

X Minus One will have a 3-source merge and audit completed shortly. This was one of the first programs I collected before I started the station publicly. In my memory I thought I had good quality at the time after merging some collections but today there's better and it needs some attention. One of the sources is the reel collection but I don't know yet if any of those will win. So far they sound just as good as other good sources so we'll see.

August 13, 2018

Performed an audit/merge on Philip Marlowe replacing nearly half the episodes with upgraded audio.

Below are the 2 shelving units with the entire Ohio collection.

August 8, 2018

20 hours, 1,000 miles, 40 x 1.5 cu ft. boxes, 1,500 lbs, 2,000 reels. It was a long day yesterday but I've secured a well-cataloged reel collection from 30 years of collecting in good condition as well as an AKAI 1722W reel deck.

July 27, 2018

Just purchased 4 large storage shelves for physically storing and 2 5TB drives for digitally storing the incoming reels. Each reel occupies (a convenient for calculations) 1GB when recorded in Apple Lossless. I was thinking I'd have to rent a storage unit for this volume but we managed to do some cleaning, reorganizing and purging things we don't need to make room. The number of reels expected over the next year is still unknown but could be as high as 6,000 now and perhaps higher if I go after another reel collection that is also available but much farther away.

I will surely need to get another and a better reel deck than the Sony TC-530 I have. I've already done a minor overhaul to this deck and had to deal with sticky tape syndrome cleanup. I don't count reel decks as an expense yet because there's a chance some of this will be gifted to me or at least I'll get it a low cost. New and upgraded audio will trickle into the broadcast library and may not always be worthy of mention here.

July 19, 2018

Just acquired about 1,800 reels of which 600 are OTR out of over 3,000 5,000 OTR reels potentially to be acquired this year. I've already digitized a few reels and added or replaced episodes in The Line-Up, Hall of Fantasy, The Clock and This is Your FBI. It will be a mining expedition to find where the reels add to the collection or surpass the quality of what we already have. I'm sure only a minority of it will be upgrades. Collectors typically put 12 (30 min) episodes on each reel using one program on the left and one on the right for stereo tape. So I can digitize them at a minimum of 2x speed.

If you'd like to purchase used blank Ampex 1800' or 2400' 7" reels for cheap (no boxes), let me know.

June 13, 2018

With the help of station friend Ryan's contribution of episodes, I did a thorough audit of Gang Busters giving us a total of 68 episodes with audio good enough for airing. Gang Busters had a very long run from 1935 to 1957 with probably over 1,000 episodes that originally aired. It started on NBC, went to ABC when that was formed out of NBC Blue and then later was on CBS and finally on Mutual. Unfortunately very few recordings are available or in the public domain that I can find. Gang Busters entered into English slang "to go on as Gang Busters" due to the loud opening of the show. It's open cases announcements with "be on the lookout for" may have brought as many as 286 criminals to justice in one year and were later imitated in the 1990's by Unsolved Mysteries on TV.

April 19, 2018

The world keeps moving and although we can stay in one epoch for radio, we can't do the same for the internet and web. I had to remove the antique radio gallery due to the gallery software not being updated since 2013 making it incompatible with the version of php I must move to. I also removed Twitter but replaced it with this journal on the mobile version which I think makes the mobile better.

April 13, 2018

Jack Benny is done from 1938-1955 giving us 495 playable episodes. That's as far back as makes sense to go from what I've been able to listen to. 148 episodes of Life with Luigi was added and more than 100 other audio upgrades were done to several other shows in the past month. All in all there have been 4,000 shows upgraded or added in the past year.

March 14, 2018

Jack Benny is done for 1943-1955 so far with 365 airable episodes. I've done audio work to 95%. In a set of two episodes I was comparing where Jack and the gang are on a train, one file has noise reduction done already which made it sound pretty clean and the other didn't. But on further comparison, I discovered the noise reduction had actually removed the intended train background sound effect. So I obviously used the other and did my own noise reduction. It has to be done carefully. For example, you don't want to remove the subtler sound of phone ringing as heard over the line from the caller side.

March 6, 2018

In the process of doing a complete audit and upgrade on Jack Benny. Working my way backwards, I now have 203 episodes done for the CBS years 1949-1955. This is a really good audio quality upgrade but it is taking some time as I'm having to do audio restoration work to almost every single episode.

February 24, 2018

Just added 91 episodes of Tales of the Texas Rangers to Police Stories. First episodes will be heard Sunday. At first blush you'd think this would be a western and fit in Frontier Stories but it is set in contemporary (OTR) times and more or less resembles a Texas version of Dragnet.

February 20, 2018

Just completed a 5 source merge quality improvement on Our Miss Brooks giving us 124 episodes we can play. Also just completed a 3 source merge full replacement of Night Beat giving us 69 episodes.

January 6, 2018

Thought I was done with the Lone Ranger but I was not. Did another infusion bringing the total up to 1,828, which happens to be the year Rossini began composing the Lone Ranger's theme song (aka The William Tell Overture). I quality reviewed a lot of audio over many days and 10's of hours. I adjusted a lot of audio removing leading and trailing silence, removing hum, and even notch filtering-out a 4,500Hz tone in some episodes among other things. I made good use of batch processing and 12 CPU cores on this project. Thanks to Bob Merritt of Conyers OTR for helping with this.

The programs that are not The Lone Ranger in Frontier Stories make up 628 episodes and already with the 685 we had for the past 3 months, The Lone Ranger was getting heavy play to the dismay of some Lone Ranger haters who made sure I knew. I actually understand that as I didn't care much for it either. Even without the complaints I would have done this: I made it so The Lone Ranger only plays Monday, Wednesday and Friday as it mostly originally aired and everything else plays the other days. Everyone should be happy. The Lone Ranger is actually a very good program and sometimes includes some history. It's a lot more enjoyable when we have good audio.

BTW, I forgot to mention I added 27 episodes of Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons in December.

December 9, 2017

Got notice from my web hosting service that we were overtaxing the server with the amount of activity--over 400,000 hits to PHP files per day mostly coming from javascript data refreshing in desktop, desktop player, and mobile pages producing apache log files upwards of 100MB per day. So I slowed the refresh rate to 60 seconds from 30 in javascript and created a chron job/shell script to hit the PHP several times per hour to produce static html files so that all the hits are just getting static files instead of running PHP. PHP runs for refresh data should now be only about 1,000 per day instead of nearly half a million.

Just noticed today that Jungle Jim is not rotating past the first two episodes. No one said anything. It will now start rotating beginning tonight.

September 28, 2017

New serials schedule starts today. Different serials will run on different days. In addition to Superman 3 days a week (Mon, Wed, Fri), other days will be for Magic Island (Tues), Speed Gibson (Thurs), Jungle Jim (Sat), and Marco Polo (Sun).

The Lone Ranger project is done with 685 airable episodes replacing the older 150.

September 16, 2017

I've embarked on what will be the largest project for any program with the Lone Ranger. This program ran 3 times per week from 1933 to the mid-50's with over 3,000 total episodes. Recordings were only made or kept consistently starting in 1938. Before I started this we only had about 150 episodes approved to play and not all of them were good. Now I'm about halfway done and there are nearly 500 fixed and or approved episodes. I've properly titled, named, distilled the best of duplicates, and done something to nearly all of them in a couple different audio editors. I'll continue this as I find time and it is possible I will go to reels to do my own digitizing since so many mistakes I'm finding were made at the digital stage.

April 6, 2017

Added the new Game Shows segment today starting with episodes from Information Please and The Quiz Kids. It airs 5:30 AM and 8 PM. I wanted to put it at 8:30 PM to match the time announcement Information Please often makes that it is 7:30 in New York but I'd have to swap it with Serials. The progression from Comedy Shows to Game Shows made more sense. Removed You Bet Your Life from Comedy but haven't placed it in Game Shows yet since I want to review it better for quality. Tens of hours went into preparing these game show episodes to have them properly dated and titled and to review many hundreds of audio files to find the best and then edit most of the best to make them better. To make room in the schedule I placed Science Fiction and Spy Stories in the same 30 minute slot daily. Science Fiction will be Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Spy Stories will be Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

March 19, 2017

Added 26 episodes of Stand By for Crime to Detective. This program was apparently done in 1953 but it has no exact dates and no sponsor. It could have been a sustained summer replacement but it's not entirely clear if it ever aired. It is good nonetheless.

January 9, 2017

After what seems like a couple years, I've finally finished listening to all 461 Whistler episodes in order. I was doing this on a Sansa Clip as my bedtime listening to make sure I've heard every second of audio and certify it is good listening. In the process I made a few adjustments and fixes.

I should be adding 22 Cloak & Dagger episodes to Spy Stories this week

I just updated the Antioch Rebroadcaster to version 1.0.7 which addresses issues mostly in the Windows version.

August 12, 2016

I added a clock to the main page that should show you the current time in Antioch. Since it is client-based javascript, it has to read your local time, get UTC time and then apply the offset to get U.S. Central Time. Please let me know if this is wrong for you.

ABN listener, Brian, has written a screenplay inspired by The Whistler episode that aired today, Stolen Murder. He's put together a speculation trailer and uses character names Elliott and Lewis as a nod to OTR.

May 14, 2016

I added $100.00 to the needed this year which still keeps it well under last year. The reason is so I could upgrade audio tools to work with all of the raw material I have for additions and audio upgrades I will be doing this year. The tools have gotten much better than what I had. Just a couple weeks ago I did this with Boston Blackie and added 19 episodes and improved a few dozen other episodes.

April 12, 2016

We reached the halfway point for funding the station for the year. A few weeks ago I helped with that by lowering expenses by bringing our maximum listeners down to 1,200 from 1,500. Only once ever did we exceed 1,200 and I looked at the peak in the past few months to determine the best maximum.

When ionospheric conditions permit I try to get on with ORCATS (Old-time Radio Collectors And Traders Society) on 7.238MHz LSB Sundays at 7AM CT. ORCATS formed in the early 70's and has been meeting on the 40m amateur band since that time. The two founding members (Ken W9ZMR and Larry WA8DDN) are still running it. I first started with them in 2003. It can be a challenge to communicate with conditions that change week to week and minute to minute sometimes. We also compete with an AM broadcast station at 7.235 and also sometimes hams just 2KHz above us so a notch filter and passband filtering or other filtering is often required. I know that maybe as much as 20% of listeners are hams. You are welcome to participate or at least just check-in and say hello. 73 de KC9AYH.

December 31, 2015

With a couple large donations by postal mail that came in today in addition to the several other donations of the past few days and weeks, we completed the funding for 2015 and moved into funding 2016. Wonderful. Today alone $542.00 was donated. Thank you for the full support this year. Happy New Year.

December 12, 2015

We are rather far behind in funds donated this year compared to all other years. In previous years we were fully funded by December 15th. I prefer not to solicit over the air and certainly won't do that this year. New this year, I added a fundraising offer where you can get a discount offers app for your phone for $20 and donate $10 to ABN. This comes from a dedicated listener in Minnesota who wanted to help.

For 2016, I'll look at cutting expenses and see if we can get a better rate. When I moved up to 1,500 allowed from 1,000 we got a much better rate so I'm not sure we'll save all that much by taking it back down to 1,200. But hopefully all of this bandwidth should cost less in 2016 than it did 10 years ago. To all of you who donated this year, thank you. Those small donations are the majority and they absolutely do make the difference. Thanks particularly to those who subscribed to monthly payments.

In 2016 I will make some more moderate schedule changes and add a whole new segment. My idea is a grabbag segment that picks programs that don't fit into our current subgenres. I have a huge inventory of very good quality now. It just requires my time to review it.

The Cinnamon Bear starts today at 3PM & 8:30PM and runs two episodes a day through the 24th. Last year was the first year I listened to the whole thing and even though it is a juvenile serial and sounds a bit hokey with the characters, it is actually quite good with some very creative original music. And Santa even has a ham station revealed near the end of the series.

December 7, 2015

To help us finish off the year, we have a special offer. When you purchase a digital coupon book for $20.00, $10.00 goes to ABN. A card is postal mailed to you which you can scan with your smart phone to use an app that will give discount offers to you based on your location from now until the end of 2016. Visit the Support page for more information.

Ended the poll question today. Out of 332 that responded Nov 17 - Dec 7, 64 said they were amateur radio operators. That's an incredible 19%.

Pearl Harbor day, 74 years ago today.

November 17, 2015

Just completed a behind-the-scenes update to the HTML & CSS to make it more modern. The Recent & Upcoming now has a tabbed interface and some other refinements.

I also just added a poll question: Are you a licensed amateur radio operator? Just 0.2% of the U.S. population can answer "yes" to this question. But the reason I ask is because I've received what seems like an disproportionate number of emails from amateur radio operators.

November 9, 2015

The site now has a mobile version that appears like a mobile app. Just use the web browsers such as Chrome or Safari on your smartphone to go to radio.macinmind.com. On Android you can save to your home screen for easy app-like access. The same can be done for iPhones but unfortunately when launching the site that way it doesn't play in the background whereas Android does. You should have player controls to play and pause on the lock screen. Also for Android users, you can request the desktop site if there's something there not in the mobile that you want to see.

July 13, 2015

Just updated the Antioch Rebroadcaster app

Before that, at the end of May I released the Antioch OTR mobile apps for iOS and Android.

February 28, 2015

Changed the frequency to 1610 KHz so I make no particular claims about getting around town as this frequency is competing with many stations day and night. I moved it to 1610 because I've only ever heard signal reports from amateur radio operators nearby but never from anyone else over the course of 11 years. I hear the kids now don't even know what AM radio is. Also the rules are easier in the true AM broadcast band and my current objective with the terrestrial side of the station is to go back to my original idea of giving content to the antique radios in the house and power the bedside crystal radios. Since the frequency is no longer a big part of the station, I've slowly removed references to AM 1710 and now ID as "Old-Time Radio Antioch".

I released a new version 1.0.4 of the OS X dashboard widget. I'm not sure how much dashboard widgets are used but the new version has some fixes and an updated icon.

I'm considering some small schedule changes after over 5 years since the last change. It will not be very major but it will allow some of the long-time listeners a bit of rotation on the types of shows they hear. There's more in the works but you'll have to wait for that.

February 19, 2015

I'm really late with this kind of feature but I just made it so the main page now dynamically updates without a browser refresh.

January 17, 2015

Classical music was indeed played often in the early days of radio so their use on AM 1710 is not so out-of-place. See here.

November 29, 2014

We'll be running Christmas Serials beginning today @ 3:30PM & 8PM to run through December 24th.

November 18, 2014

Added 211 Escape episodes to Mystery/Thriller this past week. I'll be running the advent/Chrismas series The Cinammon Bear playing two episodes a day starting in mid-December to culminate in the ending near Christmas.

September 11, 2014

Just completed 108 audio upgrades to The Whistler while also adding 21 new episodes.

November 16, 2013

After 12 days, here are the results of the poll:

November 4, 2013

I put a poll up on the left side of the site with the idea of getting some feedback on the idea of making a separate channel for period music of the 30's and 40's.

It's been asked why we don't just play period music in between shows. Some background: AM 1710 pays no royalties for playing OTR. That was challenged by SoundExchange and I hired a lawyer to show we didn't have to but that meant AM 1710 couldn't play anything that has royalties which includes any music from 1928 up. Of course it would be very natural to use period music in between shows but due to the way the laws are setup for collecting royalties, we would be paying royalties for the total number of hours the station plays everything instead of just when the music plays. This would amount to at least $2,000 a year with no clear way to properly report the OTR shows even if we did agree to pay royalties for them.

By running a separate channel, all royalties would be correctly collected for just the music. Also the audio quality of a separate stream would be better suited for this music. How much this would cost would depend on the popularity. For both streaming and royalties it might be somewhere between $900 and $1,200/year for a dedicated server and royalties which I would combine with the amount needed. Thus the question to AM 1710 listeners since this expense would be combined.

October 29, 2013

DSL to Antioch went down at 2AM. I had us on backup through Verizon but as the DSL sputtered on and off it apparently disrupted the backup during the morning as it tried to switch back to the DSL. Everything looks back to normal as of 10:40AM.

October 21, 2013

TuneIn is now properly using the one correct URL which should now solve issues particular with their Android apps. Unfortunately, over two weeks is the norm for very simple support requests with TuneIn as I had a similar wait to get credentials from them for their AIR API in August.

October 8, 2013

TuneIn update: For any users of TuneIn where AM 1710 is not playing, go to Options, then Choose Stream. You may see 3 different streams. Choose one that works. Right now only the top one works for me.

Apparently all TuneIn needs to do is remove the dead wood or program their app so it rolls over to a working stream would be smart. On the Samsung SmartTV it does this as I watch it attempt to make 3 connections quickly before working. This is new since this didn't work before so perhaps not all 3 "streams" were available before. On iOS, all the streams work. Honestly, I don't know why they show 3 streams when as far as I know there's only one. I don't think anyone is relaying right now. Perhaps they are all different URLs to the same stream and iOS is more accommodating than Android.

As for squeezebox, I don't know how that works and whether you have the ability to go to options then choose stream or whether it will auto rollover to a working stream like the SmartTV does now.

October 3, 2013

Here are some tips regarding getting reconnected after our switch to icecast:

I'm told by users that those devices which use reciva as their radio directory have the url corrected to connect to AM 1710 again but that previously created presets will not work again until you redo a search for AM 1710 and play it from the results of that search.

TuneIn is working for their web player and in iOS but is not working on the Android and Samsung Smart TV. I tried entering the stream URL in TuneIn Pro on android and TuneIn will play the stream but we are waiting for TuneIn to make the correction to their directory listing so far for about a day now. This problem could affect any devices that use TuneIn as their directory.

If your device or software used shoutcast as the directory, we are no longer listed there.

If you can manually enter the stream URL for your software or device, the correct address is http://lin2.ash.fast-serv.com:9022

Listener reports:

• C-Crane: I did a search by state and Antioch came up and Walla
• Grace Audio Mondo: They'll need to do a fresh search for Antioch. The search [at least for Grace Audio or any other service that uses Reciva] should find the updated URL. At that point save it to whatever preset desired.
• Sangean (reciva directory): Working again. New search for AM 1710 or Antioch might have been needed.
• Reciva in general: I searched for AM 1710 Antioch, and it came in fine. After that, the preset worked as it usually does without having to preset it again. So all is well with reciva, but you might have to do a search for the station even though you have it listed in "my stations." I was going to delete the old station and replace it with the new one I searched for but it wasn't necessary. As soon as the searched station came up and I clicked on it to play, everything seemed to reset itself. So if any reciva users ask about it, just tell them to do a search on the radio for your station and click it to play and everything will reset itself.
• Logitech Squeezebox (old model): Not working after searching for AM 1710 again. (Device might be using TuneIn directory so manual entry may be needed. Directions here):

October 1, 2013

Today we moved from shoutcast to icecast as our streaming server and increased our limit from 1,000 to 1,500 listeners. We've been hitting the ceiling a lot in the past few weeks. We kept the same server address and tried to keep things as compatible as possible to how you connected before. There are some unavoidable changes such as the fact that without running shoutcast, we can no longer be listed at shoutcast.com by the terms of their service. I've changed the supporting code on the website for icecast and changed the flash player as well. I confirmed that the old URL continues to work as does the iTunes listing now in "Internet-->News Talk Radio" in iTunes 11.1 and higher.

If your software or device no longer lists AM 1710, it was probably using shoutcast. If you can manually enter the URL it is http://lin2.ash.fast-serv.com:9022 or if that doesn't work, try http://radio.macinmind.com/listen.m3u

Very shortly I'll update the expenses to reflect the additional costs for this year.

June 16, 2013

Expect a short outage Monday afternoon, Jun 17th. The electrical meter box outside needs to be replaced. UPS probably won't keep things up for the whole length of the replacement time.

April 5, 2013

Last night's outage from about 12:20 AM to about 2:30 AM was due to a networking failure particularly with the OS and DNS that not only wouldn't allow any network connections, it wouldn't allow iTunes to open. I gave up on finding a fix and re-installed the OS which solved the problem.

March 26, 2013

I've removed the TuneIn app referral from the left column. In the free version of the app and on their website player, they are now injecting audio ads which changes the imaging of this station. Listeners don't know that it is not this station that is running and profiting from the advertising, but TuneIn. This station is listener supported and ad-free for that reason. I provide this service so that connections are instant and fast with no re-buffering since we use a burst buffer. TuneIn only provided the app and the radio directory. They don't contribute in anyway to the stream. I think display ads are acceptable for a free app but they go too far by injecting the audio ads. Their pay version doesn't have the ads but we still have better free and pay options.

My other issue with them, which also has to do with imaging, is my long-standing problem with their art selection. In order to avoid TuneIn from showing pornographic art, I've needed to change the artist permanently to "ABN - OTR". Yet they still choose some of their own art and have refused to allow broadcasters to opt-out of the art. Instead they blame stations for not having correct metadata. I hear this from other broadcasters as well. I can't do better with the metadata. This is Old-time Radio and they should give me an option to opt-out of art. This claim is bogus anyway because I run a music station with perfect metadata and TuneIn picks the wrong art 80% of the time. And they do this to other stations as well. I've written them about it several times on behalf of my station and on behalf of customers of my radio playout software Radiologik and they do nothing but blame the stations back. As a developer I've had other issues with them for months so I've notice a long pattern of poor responsiveness from TuneIn.

In conclusion, stop using TuneIn. Pick something else. There are good apps like OneTuner and TuneMark on iOS among others. I don't do as much on Android so if you have a suggestion, feel free to email it to me.

October 5, 2012

Fixed the Superman serial which was playing episodes out-of-order. We reset to start at episode 195 today.

September 21, 2012

Seeing the numbers in the 800s at night doesn't quite give the picture that these listener maps do so I wanted to share what it looks like at the peak hours on a typical weeknight. 95% of the listeners at 3 AM CT are in the U.S. or Canada.

The zoom levels I'm allowed are sparse so this is the best zoom picture I could get of most of the U.S. and Canada. The pattern follows a population map very closely.

And here's the breakdown by countries and players. Wireless devices, which include phones, tablets and iPod touches, have certainly grown over the years.

September 1, 2012

AM 1710 is back on iTunes radio in News / Talk Radio after a 24 day absence. Apple gives no explanation for it so I can only guess. Originally AM 1710 was in News / Talk Radio but was moved to Eclectic with iTunes 9. I never asked for that. There's now a requirement that all streams be a minimum 128kbps mp3 or 64kbps AAC in all genres except News / Talk Radio. Perhaps Apple just removed it from Eclectic for this reason since we are 24kbps. Whatever the reason, I'm disappointed by the lack of communication, explanation or apology for over 3 weeks. That said, the communication with Apple iTunes support was very responsive when I took that route about 3 weeks into this but they were powerless to help. Thank you again to all those who sent Apple feedback during this time.

August 28, 2012

Thanks for your emails and help contacting Apple with iTunes feedback regarding the delisting of AM 1710 from iTunes Radio. There is still no response except automated replies from Apple to my emails. I don't see how this is anything more than a technical or clerical error. I've further emailed the same iTunes radio email address today suggesting that they move AM 1710 to News/Talk Radio if their requirement is that stations have 128kbps streams for the other genres. I've also written Apple support for iTunes and detailed everything there. I just don't understand why Apple won't give me the dignity of an email back after 20 days. I write my customers back in minutes, hours and usually no more than a day depending on the urgency of the email. Why does it have to be such a fight? The bigger the company, the less responsive?

Update 5:30 PM: I received a personal reply quickly from iTunes account support but they were only able to tell me that we are doing the right thing by using the feedback. So go at it folks--Give them feedback!

August 17, 2012

With no notice, AM 1710 was delisted from iTunes radio on Wednesday August 8, 2012. Remarkably, it hardly made a difference in the volume of listeners. We topped 816 last night. I assume the delisting is a mistake as other OTR stations remain listed, even twice sometimes even though Apple says they don't allow that. When it was first pointed out to me by a listener, I immediately emailed Apple through their official email for radio listings and followed all the protocols of how to format the email and the request. Their auto-response says that submissions and updates could take up to 5 days. On Wednesday August 15, 2012, I sent a new station submission email following Apple's protocol to add AM 1710 to News/Talk Radio.

It has been 8 days and 6 business days and no response on the first inquiry email and 2 days on the new station submission email. Now I question if Apple is hearing me at all. For my business, I try to answer my customers the same business day if not within the hour. I was really hoping this would be resolved a little more quickly but at this point I'm welcoming listeners to send their feedback to Apple via the iTunes menu.

April 27, 2012

After hitting the 800 listeners ceiling several times for up to 2 hours at a time this past week, I've moved our maximum up to 1,000.

August 24, 2011

The TuneIn people told me I shouldn't use titles if it isn't music. I disagree. But rather than pick a fight with them I've figured out that if I make the title preceding the dash something that consistently doesn't find art in a search at last.fm, I can have it display the AM 1710 logo all the time. So now all titles start with "ABN OTR -". The Green Hornet can now return without TuneIn listeners having to look at a naked lady carrying a chicken by the legs.

August 23, 2011

I've noticed the problem with very incorrect art that the TuneIn app for iOS has been trying to grab from Last.fm. But the art for The Green Hornet has crossed the line from incorrect art to plainly pornographic. I've contacted the maker of TuneIn but so far their emails have put the blame on my titling. So until we can come to a more amicable solution, I'm removing The Green Hornet from our playable library.

Sorry for the Superman episodes that were not fully playing. I've previewed episodes far ahead of what is played and heard none of these problems. In fact they opened fine on other computers and devices. I tried OS updates and iTunes update over the weekend but the problem persisted. I replaced some episodes that were troublesome and that fixed it but the problem kept happening. The actual solution ended up being just removing the tracks from iTunes and just re-adding them.

If you followed my tweets a couple weeks ago, you would have read about both my main and the backup DSL going out at the same time for different reasons. The main went out due to line trouble and the backup was working at that time but when I thought I'd do my own troubleshooting of the in-house wiring to be sure the problem was not in the house, when I tried to reconnect the backup DSL, it wouldn't authenticate. AT&T disconnected my service and couldn't tell me why. After 4 attempts to find out why over a couple days, I asked that all my service on that line be removed. All I could figure is that when I made the request to set me at the speed I ordered, instead of the arbtrary speed they set incorrectly a couple weeks before, they must have disabled authentication and cancelled service. Weirder yet is a couple days after disconnecting phone service and DSL on that line, an AT&T guy shows up to install new service. And he wasn't even installing the correct speed I originally asked for either but the incorect speed I never asked for. Of course I told him the basic story and he said he'd sort it all out. Verizon 3G turned out to be a terrific backup so I will no longer keep an extra DSL line here.

July 23, 2011

I just fixed the Widget so it works again (version 1.0.2). I'm still disappointed that Quicktime gets tripped-up apparently by the streaming metadata so you'll hear skipping every couple minutes. So for the best experience, I don't recommend it. If anyone is not hearing these skips, I'd like to know.

I just fixed the encodings for the playlists so accent characters show properly.

December 8, 2010

I've received a fair number of complaints about the music. The reason we play classical and piano music is to avoid $2,000.00/yr in royalties that would be due to Sound Exchange for our mere 30-45 mins of incidental music if we choose to play music of the period. I need filler for the way this station runs its schedule and this is the best I can do right now.

We received considerably more than our financial needs this year even with the challenges of legal fees and purchasing a whole new computer. I've used the extra to help upgrade my audio restoration software and have already worked on hundreds of episodes in the comedy sections this month. Starting today, I'll start receiving for 2011. The amount needed will start out less at $3,000.00 for the year to pay for the streaming server and a dedicated internet connection here.

If we are far ahead of schedule for donations in 2011 I may elect to use the extra to get legal help to possibly allow us to play period music again without having to pay unreasonable royalties.

If you can advise on a good Android app to play AM 1710, I'd be happy to present that info here. Just write me using my email address at the top of the home page.

November 13, 2010

A listener pointed me to another iPod Touch/iPhone app that I now think is the best. TuneIn Radio is $1.99 and features background play, sleep timer, record, pause and resume or replay, and it offers a nice radio directory, link to our website, and the basic weekday schedule is there as well, although I'm in the process of getting radiotime.com to correct the info for the weekends and serials. It's also perfect for responsive and smooth operation.

November 4, 2010

I finally got myself an iOS device--an iPod Touch 4G. And now I finally got to see what it's like for many of you who have listened on this device. It gave me a chance to try different streaming apps out and I've determined that Tunemark Radio ($0.99) is the best. It has a sleep timer (which many of you use AM 1710 for as do I), it has a link to the home page on this site, it streams in the background and even pauses and keeps a running buffer. You can go back a few seconds or minutes and relisten to a portion if you need to. It allows you to set your own background I choose to use a very nice warm shot of one of my antique radios.

October 12, 2010

I've expanded the Superman from 325 episodes to 983 episodes. The new episodes will span September 1945 through September 1948 and we get to hear Batman and Robin acting in the plots starting in 1945 too. I and my three kids are running through these episodes ahead of the station schedule for a quality check before airing. The run of Superman should go probably to the end of 2011. The Superman that played today and yesterday were not originally meant to play on AM 1710 and we will return to the serial starting with episode 205 in the middle of the Dr. Deutsch and the Radium Mine story starting tomorrow.

September 22, 2010

The new Mac uses about 1/10 the power as the 2002 G4. This is little enough power that I expect it should easily survive power outages over an hour or more and shut down nicely if the outage is too long. Even with the portable external HDD, it is nearly silent. The only other time this room has sounded this quiet was during a power outage so it's still a bit disconcerting.

This is the first time I've used a brand new Mac for AM 1710 and it was purchased by your donations. Thank you.

August 14, 2010

Our lawyers have determined that we do not owe royalties to Sound Exchange for our playing of old-time radio shows unless Sound Exchange can prove otherwise and now we have answered Sound Exchange's lawyer. There are a few other issues about our content I need to clear up with our side but this challenge did add $1,000.00 to our expenses. Certainly worth it to do the right thing. Had we just paid the default to Sound Exchange, no one at Sound Exchange was able to tell me of any owners who would have been properly paid. This is a battle we are fighting ourselves ultimately on behalf of all old-time radio streaming stations since we are the only ones we know who have been challenged. And this is one of the first good bits of news.

August 2, 2010

I have a lawyer that's agreed to look into the Sound Exchange situation and give us some clarity.

July 26, 2010

Our expenses may be higher that expected due to a requirement to pay royalties to SoundExchange and register with the Copyright Royalty Board of the United States Copyright Office. Should we increase our monetary need, based on the donations so far this year I've decided it's very likely listeners will step up to the challenge and we'll continue on.

I've operated with the assumption that all material presented on this station, in particular the old-time radio shows, were not or are no longer under copyright based on the laws covering material between 1923 and 1963 so long as those copyrights were not renewed. I believe it is possible that this may exempt us from SoundExchange royalties.