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February 21, 2010
More than once in the past
couple weeks I've received emails from people regretting that they will
no longer be able to listen to AM 1710 because either a boomarked
address no longer works or because they can't play .pls files. In this
regard, I have not changed anything on you! AM 1710 is an
mp3 stream which is the most compatible streaming format on the face of
the earth. It is supported by hundreds of software titles and devices.
It was even begrudgingly supported by the makers of competing
formats such real player and windows media.
Let me take the mystery out
very quickly. A .pls file is used for web browsers in particular so
that they can know that they don't have to interpret the mp3 stream
which they are not designed to do. The .pls tells the web browser to
hand it off to a supporting application. A .pls file is merely a little
text file that contains
the locations of streams or files. If that doesn't work for you, just
use the URL without the .pls file. Enter one of the URLs below in your
player or device and bookmark it or whatever it is you do to keep it:
http://lin2.ash.fast-serv.com:9022
If you can't resolve the ip name it is
http://209.9.238.5:9022
February 3, 2010
It was a pretty big undertaking but
I made AM 1710 keep playlists weekday independent. I also made it so it
can schedule 2 days in advance whereas before it was only scheduling 20
minutes in advance. What you get for all of this is the ability to look
back about 2 days and look forward at least one day for what will play.
So if you heard something in the middle of the night and
weren't about to get up to find out, you can now look it up the next
day. I'm only doing this for the OTR shows so don't ask
me about doing it for the music. It's all in the Recent & Upcoming
episodes on
the left menu.
Also, a couple days ago I added the flash
player (see the flash player button the left) so you can play AM 1710
right in your web browser here.
January 25, 2010
fastserv.com
has adjusted our streaming rates
which will save $910 on streaming annually (from $3,780.00 to
$2,870.00) while also increasing the maximum from 700 to 800 listeners.
It's your choice. Vote with your money. Already a couple years ago I
quickly replaced the power supply which died in the aging Mac G4.
Fortunately I happened to keep the old power supply after Apple gave me
a free replacement due to a noise problem. It's a bit more noisy again
but it's holding okay. In an emergency I can replace this G4 with a
mini I'm already using. But it
would be good to properly replace the
2003 Mac G4 with a new Mac Mini with two large HDDs. That would be just
about $1,000. Thereafter, in 2011 and beyond, things should cost less
per listener.
January 11, 2010
Nice little find... Radium
now carries AM 1710. Radium is a small radio app that keeps its
interface in your menubar on Mac 10.5 and up.

January 4, 2010
I listened to a couple hours
of AM 1710 myself while on the road last week. What amazed me was that
I was able to listen right through the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel on
Route 76 in Pennsylvania without interruption. Credit to Verizon for
their mobile data services.

I just added 53 new Agent K7 returns episodes. These are 15 minute
episodes from 1938 which will air in the Spy Stories segment.
October 6, 2009
The problem last week was the
DSL and AT&T was actually very good. My first call I still had to
go through the stupid questions but it was mostly friendly. My second
call was directly to someone in St. Louis (they make a point to say
that) and he saw the errors while we were on the phone. He had someone
out here withing 3 hours. That person did some tests and gave me some
ideas while determining the problem was probably inside the house. He
still suggested he change a port in the CO which was supposed to happen
within 3 days and in fact happened within 16 hours. But before that
happened I figured it out by process of elimination. The AT&T guy
who came out suggested my wiring in the house should be redone but I
eventually figured out it was merely the cable between the jack and the
modem. I was already on that track days before calling AT&T by
elininating a hop through the UPS and assumed the cable of a higher
thicker quality wouldn't be bad. With DSL solid again, I moved AM
1710's stream back to that line. I had some things to clean up form
network issues such as intros and outros that were not properly
replaced but now things should be all cleaned-up.
September 30, 2009
Either the DSL or the router
is causing a connection drop here every hour or two now. The problem
started a couple days ago and has only gotten worse regardless of what
I've already tried so I moved AM 1710's outbound to the other DSL line
while I troubleshoot the original. We'll see how that goes.
July 8, 2009
Just ending Chandu we now
begin the enormously long (439 episodes) Jungle Jim. If all of them are
good enough to play, this serial run will take us 10 months to get
through. We're busy previewing it well ahead of the airing schedule.
The Milwaukee Theater is presenting Say
Goodnight Gracie September 26. If anyone's seen this, feel free to
write me to let me know what you thought of it.
June 20, 2009
The Behringer Ultra-Dyne 9024
went kaput a couple days ago so no more hardware processing. I happened
to be exploring further processing the stream for a happy processing
compromise for the stream and the terrestrial when a day later I
discovered Nicecast would allow me to parallel process so I was able to
create a fork in the audio chain and apply further software audio
processing to a separate audio output on the Mac so the stream remains
moderately processed and the AM is fairly aggressive. Not bad. If only
I could find software that will do assymetric peak limiting. Nicecast
is truly remarkable software. I also just learned that I can hot load
and uload any plugins in Nicecast without quitting the program and
restarting the stream.
Yesterday we also replaced the router with a better one with traffic
shaping and more. The old one, which I purchased in an emergency from
Walmart, will be my backup as we enter lightning season.
Saturday night into Sunday night our stream provider is doing some
upgrading and moving of hardware using a service window of about 4
hours so if the stream is down during that time you know why.
May 30, 2009
We had our wings clipped just
a little this week. I had to remove a very small number of programs due
to a copyright claim on particular restored programs. But in place of
that material, particularly for the weekends in the serial slot, we are
adding The Ghost Corps on Saturday and The Green Valley Line on Sunday.
The former is sort of an underground agent network working in the
mid-east and far east. The Green Valley line is a serial about a small
train town at the turn of the 20th century. We also should get Jungle
Jim as the serial successor to Chandu in a few weeks. My kids are
reviewing it on their mp3 players now. Thanks Allen for
the suggestions and help with the material.
I get to work with Windows here and there, and when I do I'm just so
envious the Mac doesn't also have tools to maliciously remove software.

May 20, 2009
There are more show replacments (Lone
Ranger) and wholy new shows (Yours Truly Johnny Dollar) in the pipeline
coming this summer. The problems of iTunes crashing and related
symptoms all seem to be solved. The last problem was with intros and
outros for a few segments due to the trash not being able to be emptied
one day and I forgot to clean up the accumulated problem intros and
outros for Frontier Stories, Family Comedy and at least one other
segement since late March but that should all now be fixed. Now we just
wait for a hardware failure or another lightning strike.
March 30, 2009
Here are a few things I've done in the past month or so... Added about
20 new Mystery House episodes, started the Chandu serial, and changed
weekends to play music programs in place of the serials since most
serials were traditionally Mon-Fri and musical remote programs were on
the weekends.
I've recently started tackling the growingly frequent problem of iTunes
crashing when scheduling segments which would cause trouble for the
segment playing and for the segment scheduled causing you to hear
silence at times. I ran all system updates but that didn't fix it so I
convinced myself that I might be causing the problem with my own
programming and so I'm changing some of the ways scheduler works to
attempt to work with iTunes in a more friendly manner that will not
cause it to crash. If you hear silence for a segment or part of a
segment over the next week, I probably know about it and I apologize.
We'll get dependability back better than ever I think since all the
other
cogs in this machinery, particularly networking, have proven to be very
solid for months straight now.
January 24, 2009
Earlier this week I added 75 Phil Harris - Alice Faye to Family Comedy.
December 2, 2008
There are a few inches of snow on the ground in Antioch. In a good snow
season we have snow on the ground for most of the next 3 months but we
usually have a couple full meltdowns during that time. The fill music
switches to Christmas and seasonal music for the next month. Yes, we
say 'Merry Christmas'.
Again last Friday we had a 3 hour outage caused again by me finding the
station running but Nicecast not broadcasting. So, I now have a cron
job running an Applescript that checks the status of that every minute
and repairs it if it is broken. This makes us even more resilient now I
hope.
For serials we will do Cinnamon Bear beginning on the 10th after we
finish the Jerry at Fair Oaks series. After that I think we will do
Speed Gibson which we haven't played in a couple years.
We exceeded our financial needs for 2008 streaming costs and I'll be
using that extra all for other AM 1710 needs. Thank you! I have a
little something going back out later this month via postal mail to
those who donated. Eventually we'll need to replace the vintage 2002
Mac and I have another Mac on standby that can replace it in case of a
hardware failure. Also there are always new HQ shows to acquire. We are
in really good shape and I thank all of you who have supported this.
It is nice to have this escape from the everyday but I do encourage
those particularly in the US to remain engaged in the current events
and let those depression and WWII era references in these
historical
programs lead us to be grateful for what we have today as well as put
us on guard for our current challenges that are similar.
October 29, 2008
AM 1710 was down from 5:30 AM to 9:50AM. I happened to catch Nicecast
not running (on Standby) so I clicked "Start Broadcast" and it started
again. I don't remember seeing that before. Internet was up the whole
time, router is good, so it was either denied service at fast-serv or
more likely something mysterious here.
October 27, 2008
We begin a revised schedule today to rearrange the programs that
play in the evening and early morning mostly so that those who have
been
listnening for years (and there are probably hundreds of you) can hear
some different material at the times you can listen. I do this pretty
rarely but it has been suggested by a few listeners and I concur since
it has been a long time without any significant changes. I also removed
Mystery/Thriller and replaced it
with
Matinee Theater for the 9AM slot since some people here in the U.S.
don't find that Mystery/Thriller fits the morning mood well.
The average listenership has remained about the same for the past
couple years now. But there's an interesting trend of listenership
increasing in the nighttime/overnight so that it nearly surpasses the
daytime peak now with peaks in the mid 500s common at both times of day.
The router problems of two weeks ago are apparently solved. I should
also point out that the OTR audio is backed-up three times and one of
those
backups even accounts for natural disasters. I also have provisions to
have a replacement AM 1710 computer on the air within a few hours of a
hardware failure should one happen. We're in good shape here.
October 14, 2008
Due to router problems over the past week or two I've given up
troubleshooting and repairing the old one and this afternoon I replaced
it. The new one has dropped the connection a couple times this evening
and I'm hoping it smooths out here with some adjustment. I'm keeping a
close ear on it so if you notice erratic service in the near term you
at least know I'm aware of it and working on it.
September 3, 2008
We'll get back to Superman later after I get more work done on it. We
made it through the complete 325 episodes of the first series and a
little beyond. In the meantime I've switched the serial segment over to
Jerry of the Circus and Jerry at Fair Oaks. Dates for these episodes
are somewhat theoretical and provided by friend of AM 1710, Allen
Freitag. I also brought other similar shows together with the Shadow to
make it Incognito Crime Fighters. You'll now also enjoy The Avenger,
The Blue Beetle, The Green Hornet and soon also The Whisperer.
August 5, 2008
Added 13 replacements and 5 new of Broadway
Is My Beat. Added 12 replacements and 8
new of Fort Laramie which BTW
stars Raymond Burr also known doing Perry Mason on TV. After not airing
this show several years, I finally reacquired 81 Amos 'n' Andy shows from the sitcom
years of 1943-1945. Amos 'n' Andy started as a dramatic serial before
moving to comedy and the sitcom format. For more information, see the wikipedia
article.
Dan has added a new dial detail
shot to the antique radio gallery for a 1935 Airline radio that I
think is a must see. Want to see the callsigns across the country in
1935? You'll recognize quite a few. Some have moved and some are in
their
current dial position today.
August 1, 2008
An unscheduled (as far as I know) DSL outage took down both of my DSL
lines for 2 hours from 12 AM to 2 AM. This doesn't actually happen too
often but since I tell you when I purposely take down the station for
30+ minutes, this is noteworthy.
July 26, 2008
Doing some maintenance and basic software updates
this evening between 7:30 PM and hopefully will have everything back up
by 8 PM.
8:15 PM Update: Back on and all seems well.
July 14, 2008
AM 1710 gets nearly nationwide coverage
now with iPhone
I have reports from two listeners that
the software upgraded iPod Touch, iPhone 3G and software updated 1st
generation edge iPhone can use the $4.99 Tuner
and that it works very well even on the slower edge connections. Thanks
Dave and Keith for the reports.
July 10, 2008
Has AM 1710 (nearly) anywhere
(nearly) arrived? Take a look at the iPhone/iPod Touch app Tuner
selling for $4.99 and apparently able to tune into any mp3 station. I
haven't tried it and I welcome any feedback on how well this works.
July 5, 2008
AM 1710 is featured in two local papers
yesterday: The Chicago
Sun-Times and the Lake
County News-Sun.
I recently replaced all of the Jack Benny
with the collection from OTRNow.com, now
680 shows. I still have to do more reviewing and I may do some
merging from another collection in the future but I trust this
collection is much better than what I previously had and it was
probably the one show for which I sometimes received a complaint about
quality. Yes, I'm getting the wife and kids involved in the reviewing
process more and more.
April 13, 2008
Both a listener and my kids pointed out that we skipped some episodes
in the Superman serial. I should have listened to my kids first on this
one b/c the listener further pointed out that these episodes exist and
with that incentive I was able to find them. So we are going back a bit
to play these in order. We'll have a few repeats because of this but we
will have gained about 20 episodes.
March 11, 2008
As promised, the super-long super serial of the Adventures
of Superman begins today at 3:00 PM and 8:30 PM. I bumped The
Shadow to 3:30. I'm still reviewing and prepping this series of 1,000+
episodes months ahead of the play schedule. I suppose it should run
close to a year and a half should all the episodes turn out to be
airable quality.
February 25, 2008
AM 1710 Anywhere. It's coming.
Over the past few months I've received a few emails from people
interested in whether or not I knew of a way to have AM 1710 stream
over an iPhone or iPod Touch. The prospect would make an iPhone almost
tempting enough for me to buy at that point. (I still wish tethering my
laptop were allowed and then I'd be completely sold). I've seen another
attempt at playing streaming stations on the iPhone but it was
not complete enough to bother announcing here. The ability has been
there with other mobile applications before, but the iPhone platform
generates so much more interest by actual users, that radio over this
platform will actually increase the number of listeners appreciably and
maybe to the point where the satellite radio companies will start
fighting it.
The most recent is completely web-based and it is flytunes.fm. I recently received
word about this service by an AM 1710
listener and that AM 1710 was added to it. For whatever reason it is
generically named "Old Time Radio
Shows" station in the Talk category. So far they don't charge but it
appears they intend to. So far they don't run ads over audio or on the
site but it appears they may want to by looking at their contact page.
Also, from what I've observed, they add a delay of up to 9 more
minutes.
I already have a delay of 80 seconds and I've compensated for that by
playing things 80 seconds earlier here in Antioch. All of these things
are what may come with betas. Also I was only playing it in Safari on
my destkop computer by switching my User Agent to Mobile Safari 1.0 so
other oddities such as it stopping and graphically not showing it
playing may be because I'm not using it as intended.
This is a step in the right direction, but with the iPhone SDK
(Software Development Kit) nearing release from Apple, I predict it
will be possible to tune in streaming stations via an application built
for the iPhone and iPod touch without having to use a website
intermediary. It would even be possible for me to write such a thing
but I predict I won't need to. I can only guess that AT&T might not
like so much data use but eventually I think streaming stations to
mobile will become commonplace.
December 18, 2007
Merry Christmas!
My longest period without an update. The collection really is pretty
good now. Yes, I'll continue to improve it. But the urgency I felt to
fix everything over the past 4 years is finally tempered by
having so much in good shape.
Superman is in the pipeline to be run as a very long serial probably by
the end of winter.
New on the left links is my nighttime list of AM stations heard in
Antioch, IL. I compiled this list by listening on a Sangean
DT-180 on my living room couch using its directional antenna to
help verify station locations and to pull out stations I might
otherwise have trouble hearing.
June 1, 2007
Longtime
listener Jacob Hall has just published a flattering article
about AM 1710.
I put up a new poll to run for the whole month of
June
which I think we'll all find interesting. Many who have written me make
assumptions about what age demographic listens to old-time radio with
the thought that they, in their age group, are unusual. They might be
right. While by no means scientific, the age poll ought to satsify some
of that curiosity and confirm or contest those assumptions.
May 31, 2007:
Now that I played The
Planet Man about 3 times, and maybe once too many times, and the poll
results are in on what should be the next serial, it's time to let you
know my plan. I know serials aren't that popular but there is a core
group that loves it and I don't know of any other broadcasters doing
serials like this so we are going to keep doing it.
I'm going to defy the results just a bit for a few reasons. We've never
played Behind the Mike, it just doesn't fit well into any other genre,
and it also came in second in the poll. It is a radio show that gives
us a
peek behind the scenes of pre-war radio (which means just before the
U.S. involvement in WWII). It's available for free at archive.org here
in case you want to explore it in your own time.
After that we're going to do Magic Island. The Magic Island I have is
my 3rd copy and it is from Jerry Haendiges. Although it is now better
than Jerry's because I cleaned it and fixed it a bit which I can do
well with Jerry's stuff because he provides very high bit-rate mp3s. It
is certainly worthwhile to play here because the audio quality is
uncommon as far as I know. And even though the dialog can get a bit
cheesy, the science and the use of imagination in this fantasy is
pretty amazing and very interesting considering it is from the mid
1930s.
Also, for films about radio, explore the Prelinger Archive at
archive.org. Here are some examples you might find interesting:
Behind Your Radio Dial: The Story of NBC (1947)
Back of the Mike
(1938)
Command Performance
(How shellac records are made 1942)
May 25, 2007:
In the
past couple weeks added 63 The Man
Called X to Spy Stories, 31 The
Haunting Hour, 19 Witchs' Tale
to Mystery/Thriller, and 65 The Lewis
and Martin Show to Comedy Shows. Added 19 more This Is Your FBI to Police Stories
and did several more replacements, some removals and several dozen
pitch adjustments and noise removal fixes to The Whistler episodes and
several others. Added about 200 30's era mostly sweet orchestra songs.
From reel added or replaced a few Lux Radio and Whistler episodes. Much
more is in the pipleline but needs to be reviewed, adjusted, fixed, etc.
May 15, 2007:
You might have noticed a
bit of downtime the past couple days. Here's what's been happening. Had
to replace the router which was about 7 years old with a new one since
the old one was disconnecting when performing certain actions. The new
one gives me much better control and improved my up and down speed by
about 33%.
The power supply failed on the PowerMac G4 early
this evening. Fortunately I participated in the Apple RMA power supply
replacement progrm for noise issues so I still had the old noisy power
supply which I installed early this evening. Thankfully the noisy Mac
stays on the other side of the house so no one has to hear it much.
During those couple hours I played some Behind the Mike episodes which
I hope to add somewhere sometime.
I've added more shows and
should have many more added by the end of the week. I'll give a full
report in the next update here.
May 12, 2007:
The first batch of reels are in and are now being digitized (See
February 7 below). So far I've targeted getting more material for Spy
Stories and Mystery/Thriller and I just can't resist yet another source
for The Whistler. Could this be my 10th source now? I have a couple
dozen to review and so far I've replaced 3. With any reel at 3 3/4 ips,
it's common to find 12 1/2 hour shows on an 1800' reel. They are
recorded separately to the left and right channels and both sides, with
3 shows to a side per channel. At the same speed I'll get 8 1/2 hour
shows on a 1200' reel. So I'm also collecting other collateral that I
didn't specifically look to get so we will get a variety. Now to see if
I make this a major longterm project.
April 18, 2007:
AM 1710 listener Jeffrey Rennie let's me
know today that he's released a handy little piece of software for Mac
listeners of AM 1710. ZZ
Timer
will allow the bedtime listeners to rest in peace (without OTR dream
suggestions) by fading and stopping iTunes at a given half-hour
interval. So in case some of you don't want to be
rudely awakened by the super-modulated whistle of The Whistler, you can
set ZZ Timer to fade down iTunes and disconnect before the show comes
on.
Added 19 new This
is Your FBI
April 11, 2007:
The UPSs are having a nice workout today.
We've
had several tiny power blips over the course of the morning and part of
the afternoon today as Antioch gets a good amount of wet snow. Rather
funny since people were cutting their grass just a couple weeks ago.
But this is actually really typical here. Sometimes we even get snow in
May.
March 17, 2007:
Lesson for today: Don't leave your radio
computer
keyboard plugged-in during cat witching hour. Thanks Skeeter for
reporting the outage.
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