August 16, 2026

Rebuilt mobile version of website from the ground up. The previous site was 11 years old. I believe I incorporated every feature and accommodation from the previous site while modernizing and improving some of the functionality and cosmetics. Let me know if you have any trouble.

July 23, 2026

After nearly 23 years of cooperation and exchanging, I made the visit to Conyers, GA to finally meet Bob Merritt of Conyers OTR. It was a joy. It was interesting to hear the wives exchange about their favorite programs over dinner along with our youngest son who recently completed Army active duty and who listened to so many programs growing up.

With Bob's help, I expect to add a few more Whistler audio upgrades this year. The overall pace of upgrades and additions can never be what it was a few years ago since so much has already been done and it gets to be more rare that we can find upgrades. But we keep at it.

November 7-9, 2025

Made 6 improvements to the mobile version of the website:

Additionally, the Alt Web Player on desktop has been reworked to workaround a Windows 11 25H2 issue with streams stopping after 10 seconds.

I actually started work on a new iOS app. But the website has everything I'd want, it is already done, and any fixes or improvements are immediately realized.

September 3, 2025

After about a half dozen reports of connection issues over the past couple weeks and a few clues from some listeners, it should be solved now after a restart of the icecast server.

The "new" Teac X-300R reel deck is working well, running right now as I write this. I confirmed quality is the same as the X-300 I used for many hundreds of reels before the left channel died on the X-300.

When I bought the two 5 TB drives in 2018, I thought that would be plenty but they are 76% full now and I have so much to do. So I've purchased a pair of 14 TB WD Gold HDDs. I use one drive as a backup that goes in a fire safe. The added cost is reflected in the new 2025 funding goal. The pace of your donations this year is working very well for what we need.

August 23, 2025

We reached our funding goal on August 19. This is the earliest ever by far! Thank you.

The Teac X-300 I bought in 2018 needs repair. The left channel is no longer outputting. I love this model for the audio quality, quietness and compactness. I will see about getting it repaired but in the meantime, especially since we are funded for the year and expect enough to cover this, I purchased a fully-serviced X-300R with 30-day guarantee for nearly $800 as a replacement so I can continue much sooner. There are hundreds of reels to digitize from the group I volunteer for.

May 10, 2025

Project Audion has just performed a recreation of a missing Suspense episode from June 15, 1950 called Deadline. Check it out on YouTube. You might let them know how you found it in the comments.

April 28, 3025

Starting today, along with the announced program names and dates, titles of episodes are spoken using a clone of my voice, produced locally on this M1 Mac Mini leveraging its GPU. In my testing it has been very good but I found it can speed read Superman titles for some reason.

March 5, 3025

That was fast! New Modem/Router arrived today and since I'm a pro at this now, I was able to set everything up in about 2 hours. We are back on our primary internet connection

March 3, 2025

As of 2 AM we went to the T-Mobile backup internet plan. AT&T cancelled without warning, telling me I didn't "activate". Their only resolution is for me to return this router, start a new account, order a new router, wait for it to arrive and set it all up from scratch again because they don't allow the saving of configurations. The backup is proving to be very solid.

February 6, 2025

From the Kickstarter, just upgraded audio for 71 episodes and added 7 new of I Was a Communist for the FBI. I got the raw recordings so I could do the cleaning of hum, pops, clicks and other editing myself. I also made several date and title corrections. The transcription database has been updated with these new episodes.

The new ISP has established a pattern of pausing traffic for several seconds each day at 1:44 AM. The backup audio is working and it looks like most if not all listeners stay connected. Fortunately this tends to be at a non-critical time in Suspense episodes. It's not ideal but we will have to go with it until something better is reasonably possible.

January 31, 2025

Since the new internet connection can have brief interruptions, I've now configured the server so that it will play 'Please Stand By, technical difficulties' audio with music so that these brief interruptions will no longer kick everyone off. I took the opportunity to test it by taking the station down yesterday afternoon to update the OS and apps and it works well. I think I've done everything I can to have things run relatively smoothly again.

January 22, 2025

After nearly 24 years on AT&T DSL, I was warned recently that it is ending. I was hoping fiber would get here before I had to switch to 5G. Sure the speed is faster but there are a lot of limitations like I can't use my own router if I want to do inbound mapping. I had to redo all static IPs because the perfectly legitimate subnet I've had since 1999 is not allowed with this router. ABN uplink used T-Mobile while I made all of these changes and faced down all of these things that should work but don't or aren't allowed because I have many complexities like piHole and piVPN and my own DHCP server. I was even considering keeping 2 of the 3 ISPs I have right now to have one be an automatic fallback but that's not allowed either because I can't use that router. But I can still do manual fallbacks as I've done before. Then there were the physical changes as the modem/router needs to be on the other side of the house and everything on both sides and in between needs to be on a UPS and so that is done. Pre-planning gives way to creative problem solving.

The new uplink started at 8 PM today. Just know that if there are any issues, I'm on alert as this new connection proves itself.

November 27, 2024

Thank you again. We exceeded our donations target on November 23. Donations will begin being applied for 2025 after December 15.

The Kickstarter campaign was a success and I should receive those few I Was a Communist for the FBI missing episodes in a couple months.

I received another box of reels, this time more Superman and some Jack Benny. I will get to work on that in December.

November 1, 2024

The kickstarter for I Was a Communist for the FBI complete from rare discs is underway. The ABN collection is only missing 6 and a lot of them are already in great condition. So this would add some and improve some and therefore I've made my pledge for it. We'll see if it succeeds.

July 30, 2024

Discovered there was an alphabetical order bias in choosing date matches, particularly for those date matches that were searched of the not recently played. This came to my attention first by a listener complaining about too much Broadway Is My Beat. There were only 2 or 3 episodes in the least recently played playlist but it kept preferring this program in the second step of searching for a date match regardless of when it played. At first I changed this to random but then decided bias towards picking least recently played in all date match steps. The whole inventory should play even more evenly and completely.

Replaced the 12 year-old UPS with a new one with double the capacity. The only way to do this was to power down a bunch of equipment. This just took us down for about 10 minutes off peak hours. The Mac restores fast but the internet connection does not.

July 13, 2024

Boston Blackie is all new--137 replacements and 81 new, all direct digital from ETs. The first of this upgrade plays this Sunday. From what I received, I still had to do some audio editing, much of which I did in batch. And I had to listen to a couple dozen episodes that had no titles because no one has ever heard them to title them before and the ETs only had episode numbers. This collection also corrects speculations on episode numbers and dates made by others over the years. Text transcriptions of the episodes are being worked on now and will be added to the site sometime Sunday.

June 11, 2024

If you were listening at any time on June 6th, you certainly heard the day-long D-Day broadcast from CBS. The last time I played this was in 2005 so it was well overdue. This time I put some effort into previewing and editing the files. I still want to see if I can find better audio for this if I decide to do this again. I was expecting less listeners and perhaps some complaints about the programming but I received at least a dozen nice emails of thanks. It just makes so much sense if we are already matching today's date in history. And this audio was very immersive and convincing like it was live and really happening.

The titling javascript is now changing the title of the webpage for mobile and the web player to show the current program. On iOS for example it will show the current program and episode on the lock screen, perhaps also pass through on Bluetooth in the car, etc. But it may not update unless the browser is back in focus on phones. Just experimenting. I should try to write a proper mobile app, shouldn't I?

May 26, 2024

Happy 20th Anniversary. Today marks 20 years of continuous service. It started with only a 30 listener limit at just $15/mo. on May 26, 2004.

April 10, 2024

The transcriptions are done (Desktop/Tablet or Phone). There are 142 programs with 16,294 episodes you can search, pretty much the entire library of shows that air on ABN. This only searches the transcribed speech audio, not program or episode names unless they were spoken in the episode. You can search limiting to a single program or search all and you can search all years or limit to a particular year.

April 6, 2024

Added Transcription Search to the desktop/tablet site for starters. Over the past 12 days I've had 4 Apple Silicon Macs (64 GPU cores) working on transcribing the entire collection using the most accurate processing intensive slow model. We start with over 12,000 episodes from 70 programs today and should finish with the entire collection that airs of over 16,000+ from 150 programs in a few days. I got the idea to do this about 9 years ago but everything has now come together along with a bit of my own programming to make it happen. You can search per program or do a limited result search of all programs. If you find this useful, let me know how.

Added 12 episodes of Crime Does Not Pay to Police Stories.

March 13, 2024

Oh hooray! The Boston Blackie kickstarter was a success. And so we will have the full and best ever quality collection hopefully on here by June. I've adjusted the total needed for 2024. Thank your for your support here to help make this happen.

March 5, 2024

A few people have asked for Challenge of the Yukon to play more often. Since the 344 episodes were grouped with the 1,831 Lone Ranger episodes on Mon, Wed, Fri, and so many COTY already played since added "recently", it wasn't playing very often. I now made it so there's closer to a 1 in 5 chance of COTY playing by making individual playlists of each program--150 least recently played for COTY and 600 least recently played for The Lone Ranger. Both smart playlists are put into a folder which Radiologik OTR uses for primary selections.

There are just a few days left on the Boston Blackie Kickstarter. I sure hope this succeeds. I've pledged $500 to it. Since the funding here is going well, should I pledge more?

February 11, 2024

Added the complete 78 episodes of Bold Venture, the first of which date matched and played today. This required minor editing to all episodes and my listening to about 20 episodes in order to make up titles for them. This is the first time I've ever created titles for episodes

A new kickstarter campaign is underway for Boston Blackie and I'm in on it. I'm more excited about this one. All ETs are unplayed and it will fill in dozens of episodes that have been missing for a complete Boston Blackie collection. If successful, expect to hear the results this summer.

Speed Gibson replaces Magic Island on Tuesdays for a while

November 26, 2023

The Bold Venture kickstarter campaign by Carl Amari was successful. It's not cheap but the results should be spectacular.

Since July, I've received 4 shipments of reels that I have been transferring and working on. About a month ago I upgraded 52 episodes of Chandu, the Magician, episodes 93-144 and you will begin hearing those in December on Sundays soon. I also upgraded audio on 16 Mysterious Traveler with one new. And I've added upgraded Whistler but have much more in the pipeline of potential upgrades of that and Superman over the coming weeks. The reel deck is running as I write this.

September 22, 2023

The creator and host of the When Radio Was syndicated OTR radio program and Radio Spirts founder, Carl Amari is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to cover the costs involved in acquiring, licensing and extracting the audio from 78 vintage 16" diameter transcription discs of the Bold Venture radio series. At least 18 of these programs have not been heard in the 70 years since they were last broadcast over radio.

Amari says if this Bold Venture Kickstarter proves successful, there will be future Kickstarters for other vintage radio series from this private collection of un-played discs. These other COMPLETE radio series include Boston Blackie, The Cisco Kid, I Was A Communist for the FBI, Philo Vance, Favorite Story and Mr. District Attorney just to name a few...

July 16, 2023

Upgraded audio for 352 Whistler episodes, 75% of the whole collection, with 315 from the 48 reels and 4 newly added episodes as well for a total of 472 now. I will probably listen to all of these entirely in order over the next few months to listen for anything I may have missed in the processing but it is all on the station now.

July 5, 2023

It's been a while since I've done major work to a whole program. I recently came into possession of 48 Whistler reels. Over the past two weeks I've digitized all of these reels, 4 per day, 12 hours per day. I've cut 524 unprocessed episodes, some of which are duplicates that need to be compared and chosen. At the same time I've started processing many of these and it seems we may have hundreds of audio quality upgrades coming. It will probably take me a couple weeks to process these and do the comparisons with the duplicates and the existing collection. But as a preview, I just replaced the two episodes for today with upgrades from this recent work. This new set of audio will get merged and released into free download general circulation in the coming months.

June 11, 2023

Just released the final part 7 (1948) of the ABN Superman collection. That's everything I have now but there's some chance that it will get upgraded in the future. Things are brewing but nothing to report on quite yet.

May 5, 2023

Parts 5 (1946) & 6 (1947) of 7 of the ABN Superman collection are now available.

Most of the work recently has been on making small upgrades to The Whistler.

March 3, 2023

I've just released batch 4 of 7 (1945) of the ABN Superman collection for free download.

Now this is what I like to see. Super stable for 17 days and counting. Here are the 30-day graphs for CPU and memory.

February 13, 2023

The high CPU usage by the Music app on the Mac continued but I finally solved it just after midnight last night. I had to export the Library as XML, make a new one, and import into that. I lost date added information but nothing else. The library was started in May 2003 so nearly 20 years old. This other user, who figured it out, has a library with a very similar size and age also with lots of tracks with no artwork.

Apple released another macOS update today so I will probably do that update tomorrow near 3 PM and then after that the long-term test begins with no more restarts or relaunching of apps.

I've just released the third batch (1942) of the ABN Superman collection for free download.

January 18, 2023

So it turns out Apple's Music app replacement of iTunes is not up to the task for playing Antioch OTR. It was not playing the voice work audio files correctly, skipping parts of the audio. I heard this in my original testing months ago running in Monterey but thought it was an anomaly or would just work its way out. I tried switching from AIFF files to Apple Lossless but Music glitched the playback of any files I created that were in the range of 9 to 35 seconds. Unfortunately this is a bug of Music in both Monterey and the current Ventura macOS version which Antioch OTR is running on. I decided to make the bold move of converting Radiologik OTR to send the programs to Radiologik DJ to do the play out. There were quite a few things to consider and I never intended for it to work this way but it has now been running fine using Radiologik DJ for playing for nearly 4 days with no audio playback problems. Isn't it nuts that the richest company with enormous resources can't play audio properly with their flagship music software used by millions, but I can as an individual small developer? I'm so very grateful I have the ability to write my own solutions.

I'm still very annoyed at the quality of the Music app. It is using enormous amounts of CPU doing I don't know what. If I try to quit it, it takes 5-10 minutes or I have to force quit it. I've reset all kinds of things with preferences and cache and other files but it keeps ramping up to high CPU usage. Maybe it's trying to get terrible artwork for my files that it can never find? No idea even after examining a spin dump file on it. It's not hurting the station performance but I find it highly annoying that I'm only using the Music app as a database and it has to churn the CPU all the time.

Update 8 PM: The Music app has settled down after 10 days of CPU churning and memory burning. Everything is working very well and efficiently, temps at <10° F over room temperature and total CPU usage at about 10%. Music app is using 0% CPU and about 200 MB of memory like Radiologik DJ. Perhaps the Music app would play the voice work audio files okay now but I am very confident in the proven ultra reliability of Radiologik DJ. The station is finally running how I wanted it to and I hope we get 10+ years of service out of this thing.

I've just released the second batch (1941) of the ABN Superman collection for free download.

January 9, 2023

Antioch OTR is now running on an M1 Mac Mini as of 3 PM today. It is upgraded from the 2010 Mac Mini that it ran on for more than 12 years. Reproducing everything took a fair amount of work back in October/November 2022. The custom Radiologik OTR software needed to be modified considerably to work with the Music app from iTunes and it is built as an Apple Silicon native app.

Converting the old iTunes library from 12 macOS versions back on 10.6 Snow Leopard to current was done perfectly by making an intermediary conversion on 10.13 High Sierra before being converted again for Ventura, 13.1. Incredibly, all of the library history of adds and plays is all there from as far back as 19 years ago. I got the clone of the station running parallel on Saturday and watched to make sure it worked well for 2 days before making the switch.

The part that is more difficult to make perfectly alike is the audio processing. I was using an iTunes audio plugin "Volume Logic" before. Now I've recreated as best I could an EQ, AGC, multiband compressor and peak limiter to be close to the original sound. I will likely be tweaking it for a while.

Although everything seems to work perfectly, it is unproven for longterm. So I installed Radiologik Scheduler so I can run Silence Sensor on it to alert me if the Mac stops playing audio.

The old Mac Mini CPU was usually running the CPU at 118° F. The new one is typically running the CPU at 67° F. The combined power consumption of the CPU & GPU is less than 500mW. The whole Mac is using less than 5 watts at the outlet and is, of course, completely silent.

January 1, 2023

We had a strong finish for 2022 and great jumpstart on 2023 with donations. Thank you!

Today, I'm releasing the first batch of the ABN Superman collection for free download starting with the year 1940. This collection was meticulously restored from reels and other sources with hundreds of hours of labor and review. Thank you to the few of you that purchased this entire 1,082 episode collection when I first put it together 3 years ago.

September 30, 2022

September 30, 1962 is widely accepted as the end of the OTR era with the airing of the last episodes of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar and Suspense. That's 60 years ago today. Antioch OTR plays programs from as early as 1932 up to this end date. But it is hardly the end of radio drama. I got started OTA recording of newer programming created in the 1970s starting in 1982. Dr. Joe Webb has put together a page about September 30, 1962 and what came after.

September 16, 2022

Our streaming host moved us to a new server recently but had to move back to the old one temporarily after some failure with the new one early this morning. We had a couple hour outage. I used the opportunity to power down the 2010 Mac Mini and blow out the dust outside at 2 AM.

The 2010 Mini has been running the station for 12 years and is still running the OS it came with, Snow Leopard 10.6. This Mac has to have a finite lifespan perhaps with the mechanical HDD being the first point of failure. I've already replaced its backup HDD once due to failure. I have a new M1 Mac Mini reserved as a replacement for an emergency. But I will need to work on the OTR software, which presently only works up to Mojave 10.14, to work on the upcoming Ventura 13 so I can limit downtime in an emergency. If I can do the upgrade as a planned action, I'll purchase whatever Mac Mini is current or makes sense at that time and there will only be a couple seconds for the switchover.

September 14, 2022

The phone size mobile version of the website now refreshes the titles, listener count and play button status on the listen screen without a page reload. I think this worked before and broke for some reason. It was bothering me and it is fixed now. You still have to do a page refresh to get the daily updated 4-day schedule. I can code the trigger for refresh but I so far cannot get the whole 4-day tabbed interface to work in a dynamic div updated by javascript.

August 17, 2022

The Stream on a Budget channel/app on Roku has picked up Antioch OTR. The author is a long-time listener and I'm hoping he can add support for titles. We'll see. There are several stations there for radio and TV including Classic Reruns TV.

February 5, 2022

I recently appeared as a featured guest on a New England Vintage Electronics Club zoom meeting which was recorded so you can watch it on YouTube.

I'm continually adding and upgrading but not always noting it here so the lack of journal entries is not indicative of a lack or work or attention. I've added 70 and upgraded over 100 inside of Family Comedy in the past month. And over the past year, along with dozens of others, I helped to digitize the reels of the Joe Hehn collection now becoming available on archive.org. I'll be doing more collaborative digitizing work with this group on other collections in the near future. But I'm working on adding more new programs this year and will note that here when I do.

Journal entries 2021 and earlier