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 and that AM 1710 was added to it by an AM 1710 listener. 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. February 26, 2007: Removed a dud Dragnet episode that apparently had a very obnoxious CD skipping sound. I checked the original mp3 CD and the skipping was encoded into the mp3 by the vendor. Very strange since I've never had that result even after importing probably over a thousand CDs to mp3 myself. I'll just blame it on Windows PCs again :-). The problem only ran about 5 mins but I'm throwing the whole thing out since we still have 295 other good Dragnet episodes. We had a brief power outage early Sunday morning and on the UPS, AM 1710 went uninterrupted. February 7, 2007: Starting in April I will be cooperating with a longtime OTR enthusiast and fellow ham I've been in contact with for the past 3 years to start bringing parts of his 5,000+ reels to digital. Just as a conservative number he has more than 60,000 shows and he has many shows he recorded himself from Chicago stations as far back as 1948! That's about the time when reels became viable. It's likely I'll come up with something unique and if I do, I'll probably find more than one outlet to get it out to the world. Fortunately there's also another OTR enthusiast here in town who collects and repairs reel decks who will help get me going. I'm very excited about finally bringing 'new' content to the world. Finally finished a merge of Gunsmoke I started last year. The result is about 100 new or replaced shows. Over the course of 3 weeks I also finished a merge and audit on Lux Radio Theatre which included a lot of audio correction such as pitch shift, removing dead air, notch filtering out hum, and careful selection of good quality. The result is a smaller airable Lux Radio Theatre collection but the quality ought to be very good. One thing that seems to happen naturally after having done thousands of replacements over 3 years is shows I once considered acceptable are now completely unacceptable to me. I'm going back to fix these little by little. Fixed a bug in the scheduler last week that caused a station outage. iTunes allows for identical titles and artists to co-exist with separate files but the scheduler tries to eliminate duplicates from being scheduled. The result was the scheduler crashed because it was working with the iTunes count and not the internal count minus duplicates. Fixed this in two ways: 1. Removed the duplicate that shouldn't have been there anyway--one was supposed to replace another for quality. 2. In the scheduler I fixed the bug by working with the true number of candidates after dups are removed instead of the original number of candidates found in case any more of these duplicates still exist. The Antioch Rebroadcaster is now at version 1.0.2. It now resets the stream once a day to keep the top of hour closer to proper time and it also resets the stream if it gets disconnected for some reason. January 26, 2007: I made the Antioch Rebroadcaster public today. This will allow anyone with a terrestrial station in their own town to rebroadcast the content here on AM 1710 and do their own station IDs for their frequency. See Network Affiliates. So now you know the real reason I rebranded the station as Antioch Broadcasting Network (ABN). I also recently offset the actual station schedule by a minute and a half so that the stream is very close to on-time. January 25, 2007: Whoops! Sorry about the downtime. I was configuring the firewall for the new Mac and failed to do the right thing and failed to notice for over an hour. Just got done adding over 170 new or quality replacements to Lux Radio Theatre as part of an audit of this collection. It's worth noting that the built-in audio from the MDD Dual Gig G4 did not get along with the Ultra-Dyne 9024. It produced a 10 cps clicking and a lot of grunge in the mid-highs as if it might have been a really bad impedence match. I solved the problem by instead piping audio through the USB Griffin iMic. Two people were kind enough to report on an altered introduction to Gunsmoke. I thought perhaps this might be a rehearsal but upon listening to the file it's clear someone purposely inserted their own voice to use a swear word. So I will listen to the rest of the episode to make sure it's okay and then repair it. I very much appreciate this since this 281 set of airable Gunsmoke episodes also airs on WFEL. The file was altered before I purchased it and I'll let the dealer know of the problem. Fortunately this sort of thing is very rare. The only other time something like this has happened that I know of is from a Gunsmoke rehearsal where the cast did use a bit of langugage and as a rule I've omitted those. And a couple years ago I caught a NTR episode of Nero Wolfe from the 80's that had some heavy language. As a general rule I don't play any shows past 1962 so that was easy to eliminate. January 18, 2007: There could be some downtime tonight and subsequent bumps as I recreate the station on a newer Mac. More info to follow... ...Either I hit a logical limit on space I wasn't supposed to with the B&W or the drive is going bad. I started having trouble writing files to it and the long pause in trying to write would eventually stop the audio from playing since it couldn't read either. I also started finding some corrupt files. The B&W Mac, circa 1999 and upgraded from a 300MHz G3 to 900MHz G3, was not originally built with support for drives over 128GB, but I was using the Hi-Cap kernel extension and put it on the optical ATA bus which is the only ATA bus where hi-capacity is possible with this model. It's worked well for a long time and rather than replace the 250GB drive, I took the opportunity to setup the MDD Dual Gig G4. The switchover took less than 5 mins but the configuring of the new machine, copying all 133GB of OTR, replacing all corrupt files from backup, etc. took a full day. Yes, I keep a full backup of the entire library and I can probably start doing 2 full backups now since the MDD has a 500GB Backup drive in it and I already had another Mac backing up the library over the network. Well, we have plenty of CPU headroom now since it runs between 20-25% CPU and scheduling including making the date intros takes less than 20 seconds for an hour block and I haven't even entered into more efficient coding of that yet. I'm hoping for no bumps and I believe I covered all aspects of duplicating the setup. January 16, 2007: We move from 600 to 700 max slots after filling up a couple times last week and already this week. This will increase the streaming expenses by $45/mo or $517.50 for the rest of 2007. Thank you to all who have donated. I never would have committed to this volume by myself. Attention re-broadcasters: I've rebranded the station to Antioch Broadcasting Network (ABN) but still ID as AM 1710 Antioch. This is in preparation of IDing as other stations using a specified ID slot. I'd like your input on participating as network affiliates using a piece of software I'm writing that will stream the station and insert your own IDs at the proper times prompted by the software's recoginition of tones. It will mute the AM 1710 Antioch ID and play yours. You'll have exactly 3 seconds to ID with your own audio files. The software will be for both Mac and Windows and will require Quicktime. Please write me if you're interested January 4, 2007: The Shadow returns as a dedicated half-hour segment now that I have 179 radio-worthy episodes. I will probably rotate different serials in the position which Speed Gibson currently airs at some point. Also new are 99 episodes of NBC University Theater after a considerable amount of audio editing and correcting. There's a lot more ordered and here now in the pipeline. A couple weeks ago I discovered I had not set the processor speed to the correct speed since the lightning damage incident this summer when I rebuilt this 1999 Mac G3. So we were running at 500 MHz for several months. It's now much happier at 900 MHz but amazingly you probably would not have noticed any difference. It's back to running just over 50% CPU load, compared to 70% previously, which includes the playing, processing, and encoding of audio. No reboot necessary. As a side note, the WFEL Mac (a Blue & White G3 upgraded to a 550MHz G4) was last rebooted 595 days ago... might as well go for 2 full years. December 15, 2006: Added about 100 Christmas songs a couple weeks ago. Added hundreds of new and quality replacement episodes that I won't enumerate this time. Big Town is now part of the library in Detectives. I hope to start running a Christmas serial through the rest of December in place of Magic Island which just finished. Thanks to Nicecast's flexibility I was able to use my own programming to translate dates from near ISO 8601 of 561216 to more english abbreviated formats such as Sun, Dec 16, 1956 in the streams and also on the web page. The files retain the YYMMDD format so the translation is always realtime. Rogue Amoeba didn't need to do anything more to be my favorite software company but they did it anyway. Their Fission is a lossless editor that I can use to crop and fade mp3 files. Just today I took a Lux Radio file with a bad intro and 3 mins of hiss and no program at the end and cropped it and put fades on it and saved it without having to re-encode the mp3. It's also blazing fast, opening and saving 1 hour shows in about a second on my Quad G5. Sometime soon I'm going to go through Lights Out, since it is one of those programs like Inner Sanctum in which too many collectors have made an utter mess out of the collection and many dates and titles are incorrect. I don't like things to be historically inaccurate, and I know I won't catch all errors, but there's enough known on Lights Out that I should be able to do better with it. October 13, 2006: We're now at 600 connections. I also updated the total expenses adjusted for 600 for the rest of the year and totaled next year if we stay in the 600. Don't like what's currently playing on AM 1710? Let me recommend an alternative. A good quality collection is probably the most important part of running an OTR station and Bob Merritt's AM 600 in Conyers, GA has done like I have in that regard over the past few years. Although he isn't running it on a highly-customized Mac with schedules, date matching and processing, you'll get very good audio quality from his stream. October 10-11, 2006: Looks like it's time to move to 600 connections. We filled the 500 today. Unable to move it to 600 on the 10th so will try doing it on the evening of the 11th at 8:55 PM. October 8, 2006: WFEL 99.9 FM Antioch is now streaming online at 128Kbps. Old-time Radio is featured nightly from 6:30 to 9. 6:30 PM Westerns 7:00 PM Fibber McGee & Molly 7:30 PM The Great Gildersleeve 8:00 PM Detective 8:30 PM The Whistler September 18, 2006: The financial support for the stream is phenomenal. We're nearly done paying for 2006. Thankyou. You freed me to pour a lot more resources into the quality of AM 1710 in 2006. Time permitting, shows are now identified after playing. I found this nice if perhaps I missed the date on the introduction and after hearing the show I would be curious what the date was. Internally, old intros and outros are now trashed, reducing my maintenance to just that of the library of shows themselves for their titles and quality. This weekend I switched the Mac to a more powerful UPS. It should keep AM 1710 on the air for power outages as long as 30 mins. We've only had that long an outage maybe twice in 8 years. Last week I announced Radiologik for release in October. September 6, 2006: Added 30+ Lone Ranger and a couple dozen Boston Blackie. I've turned off shoutcast.com listing today. Paraphrased selection from fast-serv.com today: There have been issues for the past 3 days with the YP directory (www.shoutcast.com) which is causing random percentages of listener drops. It appears the only immediate fix is to not list on shoutcast.com Until shoutcast.com releases a patched version of the Shoutcast server, and/or repairs their website, this may be the only way to prevent listener drops. August 15, 2006: Hundreds of replacements and additions to Gunsmoke, Fibber McGee & Molly, Philip Marlow, and Richard Diamond. Also added 47 epiosodes of Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator as a new show to AM 1710. Released an OS X Dashboard Widget of AM 1710. Nothing particularly special here except that you get some nice art of my Philco Model 42-322. I may do more features with this later but for now it turns on and off with the left knob. I also find that using Quicktime itself is not as good as using iTunes. In particular, I'm more likely to hear skips and content out-of-order. Download it by clicking the widget icon on the left.   August 7, 2006: DSL was out for a couple hours this afternoon. That's really rare lately. Nothing I could do about that. Added 87 quality replacements for The Whistler.  Older News