July 26, 2006: Added 20 new Frontier Town. Merged-in 14 replacements and 6 new of Richard Diamond, 11 replacements and 9 new of Broadway is My Beat, and 11 replacements and 6 new of This is Your FBI. July 24, 2006: Merged-in 139 Gildersleeve replacements for quality and a about 7 replacements and a couple new for Richard Diamond. Dummy me, I restarted iTunes to solve a problem with the date introductions being cutoff and forgot to restart the stream. I guess I wasn't fully awake so that will teach me. Eventually I'll have to come up with a solution where I never have to restart iTunes but right now I find I quit and relaunch it once a week. We're listed on shoutcast.com again since fast-serv updated the shoutcast server to 1.9.7 to solve the problem. July 19, 2006: Merged-in 24 Whistler replacements for quality from the 6th source. New total for airing is 442. Added about 100 "new" songs, some recorded from 78s here. We had two very brief power outages last night (17th) and that reminded me to get a UPS while my luck is still holding. The winds were so fierce it took down 1 1/2" live branches and also tore down my 160M antenna in the backyard. Now the AM 1710 computer, modem, switch, etc. are all on a UPS. If I had known they were so cheap ($40) I would have probably done it much earlier. The UPS integrates beautifully with the Mac OS Energy Saver panel without installing anything. It even shows the percentage full of the UPS like it shows the percentage full on a Mac laptop. So I now can hold AM 1710 up over short power outages with rules to shut down if the battery depletes too far and the Mac will startup once line power is restored. July 15, 2006: Merged 15 Whistler replacements from the 5th source and audited the entire collection for proper titles and dates, removing duplicate airings, and more. As the collection stands now, it is meant for dedicated Whistler listeners that will accept some imperfect audio in order to hear the most plots. 35 were just too awful to include but there are 440 available for airing. Merged 19 Philip Marlowe quality replacements and 1 new, 8 new Jeff Regan, 16 Father Knows Best replacements and 1 new, 40 new Cisco Kid and a couple replacements, plus a couple Philo Vance quality replacements Looks like we'll have a small discount for the streaming for the rest of the 2006 so I've adjusted the total needed down to $2,875 from $3,000. July 7, 2006: Added 15 Luke Slaughter of Tombstone to Frontier Stories. Merged 50 quality replacements into Whistler making it now 4 sources. Fifth source is on the way and I expect to have 6 sources eventually. Re-changed the schedule a bit after a few suggestions from listeners. Moved the 11 PM Whistler to 9PM and bumped Police Stories and Detective shows up an hour. Brought the serials back at 3 PM and reduced Matinee Theater back to an hour. July 5, 2006: Made a schedule change for afternoons. Removed one of the Speed Gibson/Magic Island serial blocks and moved Spy Stories and Science Fiction into that time. There's always been a huge dropoff with the serials at 2 PM so we'll see what happens now. Expanded Matinee Theater back to two hours. We've been de-listed from shoutcast.com for a week or more now. As far as I can tell, it's nothing personal, just that shoutcast.com is technically messed-up according to the forums there. Who knows, maybe we'll appear back there someday. We get most listeners from iTunes listing anyway but it was always fun to see AM 1710 dwarf all other OTR stations on there. I'm back to comparing and merging and expect to have some new episodes of Cisco Kid and other shows added to the library shortly. After that I will probably start after collections at Radio Archives. Although this will be the first time I've moved to the $3/show price range. July 3, 2006: Thought I'd get a good night's sleep and missed something that is very unordinary. The scheduling software crashed while scheduling Whistler at 1:45 AM and nothing played until I received email from some of you (thank you) after I got up late this morning at 10 AM. There were two references to the same file in the iTunes library and my scheduling software was not happy about that I guess. The good news is the library of shows should now be exactly where it was before the storm problem a couple weeks ago. Now I can get back to adding and merging some new shows I'm holding onto. June 29, 2006: So far replaced all Philo Vance and Box 13 which were damaged. I verfified the entire library yesterday while making a backup. Mysterious Traveler and Philip Marlowe are the only remaining shows for which most episodes were damaged so I will replace those shortly and I think that will complete the recovery. June 29, 2006: 2:07 PM: Still assessing damage. So far Philo Vance and Mysterious Traveler collections are damaged and I'll need to replace them. These problems account for the dead air time when these episodes were scheduled but could not play. June 28, 2006: Sometime just before 6 AM on Wednesday, June 21st a storm came through Antioch and brought power up and down. I was on vacation in Brinklow Maryland when this happened and didn't arrive back until late Monday, June 26th. I was unable to determine how bad the damage was but it turned out there was probably no lightning damage but possibly just a surge. I broadcasted Whistler from my Powerbook in Maryland since that is the only thing I had with me until my brother Keith could setup a new Mac and recover the drives and then have me remote into that and set everything up until I got back. He then ran it from his home in Round Lake until I could get back. The B&W G3 would kernel panic with any network connection. I rebuilt it pretty much from scratch and had most everything back in order and running at about 1 AM today at which point it also went back on the air in Antioch again. So I'm grateful the damage wasn't as bad as I thought it was and I'm sorry I couldn't tell anyone exactly what happened until I saw it myself yesterday. I'm still experiencing a few premature endings on shows like Philo Vance today so I'll investigate that. Expect a few bumps coming out of this but generally things are going the right direction now. June 15, 2006: 1:45 AM: Unfortunately, DSL is unreliable last night and early this morning. I'm doing what I can but if things don't improve it looks like I'll be on the phone with AT&T (was SBC) to get this fixed. If it doesn't get fixed fast I will likely move the Mac to a different building with a different internet connection until the problem is solved. But for the next 18 hours there's a chance it could be unreliable. 3:25 PM: DSL disconnects anywhere from every 10 minutes to an hour and a half. I've been on the phone with AT&T today and they suggested new DSL modem. I'll be going out to get a new one this afternoon and if that doesn't work, I'll move the Mac to someone else's house tonight while AT&T dispatches for the line. 8:30 PM: At AT&T's first suggestion, replaced the DSL modem, but also by my own idea, moved it to a different phone outlet with different phone line and put it on a different circuit breaker from the HF Ham Amplifier, which BTW is absolutely not used for AM 1710. My theory is that somehow the kilowatt plus amplifier caused enough EMI somehow that it not only dropped the DSL connection but it damaged something. So I did everything in my power to change things here to resolve it and so far it hasn't disconnected in the past 2 hours. May 18, 2006: Announcing the day of the week reveals inconsistency. In the Suspense episode Donovan's Brain part 1, the day of the week is clearly announced as "Next Monday at this same time" for part 2 at the beginning and end of the program and yet all logs that I can find put part 2 on May 25th, 1944 which is a Thursday and part one also on a Thursday (May 18th, 1944). However in the preceding week on May 11th, 1944, the show is announced as Thursday and on the May 25th broadcast of Donovan's Brain part 2, they say part 1 aired on Thursday. I find no other place in history where Orson Welles stars in this title for Suspense. So I have to guess it was Thursday and they announced the day of the week incorrectly on May 18th, 1944. May 9, 2006: New HQ Gunsmoke and The Six Shooter are recently added. Even in these cases I've gone a step further and removed noise where I could without affecting the fidelity. For this reason I won't give my source since I still like what they do and don't want to give them a bad name. I can't stand most broadband noise reduction that gives audio an artifical sound. I sure wish I had cedar processing but that kind of equipment starts at $5K. Gunsmoke will get a second audit for quality soon and I hope to get more HQ replacements soon as well. I'm half-way through removing ads and PSAs that I dated to 1968-72 from 1953 Cisco Kid episodes. While I was at it I removed the long silences and did some good noise reduction. Inner Sanctum is in terrible need of a good audit. I think almost everyone has it very wrong with duplicates, wrong dates, slapped-on beginnings and endings that don't belong, etc. I'll work with this shortly. My only trusted log of shows for Inner Sanctum is here and researcher and author Martin Grams, Jr. also gives us an idea of how messed-up the collections are out there and why. May 4, 2006: Rewrote the scheduler so it's far more efficient which left room to make it even smarter. It now priortizes show selection in 5 selection steps described in Scheduling and Automation on the info page. Thanks to James A. Denton for donating his voice and time in creating additional IDs. Performed quality audits on a few more shows so very few shows remain unaudited now. Added a couple hundred HQ replacements to Phillip Marlowe, The Whistler, Sam Spade, and a few others. More on the way. The HQ collection is now well over 3,000 episodes in over 50 shows. April 19, 2006: Added a feature to the station: The date of the episode including the day of the week is announced before the episode by programming that reads the date from the file name, figures the day of the week for that date, and concatentates the audio file to place in the playlist before the episode. This is particularly nice for those who are just listening and for the FM station WFEL which doesn't publish playlists on the web. Added 47 Campbell Playhouse epiosdes to Matinee Theater, and replaced all Red Ryder episodes with 36 more complete episodes in Frontier Stories. March 13, 2006: Added 77 The Falcon epiosdes to Detective, 52 Lives of Harry Lime (The Third Man) episodes to Spy Stories, and peformed another merge of new acquisitions on the Dimension X collection to further improve the quality. February 21, 2006: Added 24 Screen Guild Theater epiosdes and replaced 72 I Was a Communist for the FBI episodes with higher quality. A number of you assumed that AM 1710 was in Antioch, CA. Well, there's a reason I don't use the state in the ID. Licensed stations are required by FCC part 73.1201 rules to use the call letters and city name in their ID. Examples: "WLS Chicago" or "WLS 890 AM Chicago". I've never heard the state in these IDs. Most stations will have other monikers throughout the day such as "Talk Radio 890 WLS" or "The Big 89" but they all must ID by FCC rules near the top of the hour. I also don't have call letters for AM 1710. Since AM 1710 is a true broadcast AM station but yet not a licensed station, I thought it would be very misleading to makeup call letters and actually air that on radio waves. I think of it like making a fake gun permit for a dart gun. That's not something a police officer would find very funny I'm sure. I use the frequency in my ID just for good practice and in case someone is hearing it where they shouldn't such as a harmonic. Thus the ID is "AM 1710 Antioch". Now this reminds me of something particularly funny. There is someone in Michigan rebroadcasting AM 1710 on the same frequency. Imagine his neighbors believing they're actually getting Antioch, IL over the air. Thanks for the donations so far. Streaming expenses are nearly covered through the end of March. I'm greatly encouraged and enthused about the donation turnout so far so I've turned my attention and my own money towards acquiring more and better material than I otherwise might have. Also, I apologize for any network problems recently. I trust fast-serv is doing their best to make things better as they've already taken some big actions in switching and adding providers when one of theirs failed and then didn't answer their calls. February 2, 2006: Frontier Gentlemen, Nero Wolfe, and Jeff Regan were all nearly completely replaced with higher quality recordings, about 100 total episodes. Also added 58 HQ episodes of Radio City Playhouse. Mobile Broadcast Network is now running AM 1710 as a service to mobile phones. January 26, 2006: Added 36 HQ episodes of the Harold Peary Show today. We go from 400 to 500 max listeners as of yesterday after we hit our head on the 400 ceiling a few times last week. Already on the first day with the new limit we hit 442 listeners. It's quite logical to assume this will keep growing. Now that the streaming costs are rivaling a car payment, this would be a good time to donate. AM 1710 is not a profit maker and any expense not covered by donations is handled by MacinMind Software which has to have some limit since there is currently no traceable or detectable income to MacinMind Software for the sponsorship. Also, I'd encourage you not to keep the stream on for days at a time and avoid any unneeded or duplicate connections if you can. Thanks for making AM 1710 such a big station and let's keep it going for those who have yet to discover it, young or old. December 8, 2005: For the most part things have been pretty solid the past few weeks. Merged-in some new and HQ December shows in most categories. Sorry I'm not answering all email, I'm just not keeping up. Does this look familiar? That's my original picture of my Transitone! Although it looks a bit worse since he oversized in html. I've since taken a new picture of that radio. I guess someone liked my picture, maybe because it's in somewhat natural surroundings on a shelf. Funny. In related news, today is the one year anniversary for WFEL 99.9 FM on the air in Antioch! I'm hoping to bring The Whistler and Westerns to WFEL sometime in this next year. November 11, 2005: fast-serv is having problems this afternoon starting at 2:45 PM. I know they were planning on network changes for the weekend but don't know if this is related. There are lots of fault points in a streaming station that are out of my control. Estimated restoration time is for 4:30 PM. Update: Although it came back about 4:45, it went away again. Apparently a fiber cable was severed between fast-serv and their provider and they're still working to get it back to normal. I've decided to make good of the situation and upgrade the Mac OS so assuming fast-serv is okay then, I should have it back at 9:00 PM in time for Police Stories. Update: Made it back on the air by 12:30 AM. The Mac is now running 10.3.9 and we're using 16KHz as a sample rate which IMO is a slightly better match for 24Kbps. Turns out I needed to update a kernel extension and it took me a good long time to figure-out that was the problem. It was stressful. I ended-up installing 10.3.9 from scratch on a different newer boot drive and rebuilt most of the station software. Hopefully everything is set. November 7, 2005: With a calm day and blue skies, the power went out in our neighborhood for several minutes during peak period of the day, the last half of the Suspense hour. October 19, 2005: Two technical problems in one day: 1. The macinmind.com domain expired and had to be renewed in a hurry. The company that handles the registration has all my old contact info and makes it very hard for me to update it so I got no warning. All settled now for the next 2 years at least. This also caused the nice work I did on the 18th to not work properly most of the day and made radio.macinmind.com inaccessible most of the day as well. 2. The local network was terribly disrupted today. In my attempts to fix I reset the internet connection a couple times which cut off the radio stream twice tonight. Took us a while to nail culprit as a network mapping utility that my brother thought he'd try out. Should be smooth sailing from here out. October 18, 2005: I'm sure most of you won't care a wit about this but it's nice for me. Previously the main Schedule page you saw was actually being served by the Mac that runs the radio station. I got tired of all the silly Windows exploit attempts coming through the DSL line to the inside web server. So I've completely moved the main Schedule page to the outside server. I did away with SSIs in favor of more PHP and now the main playlist and up next playlists are saved locally to a folder actions folder on the Mac which runs an Applescript which creates and runs a shell script to ftp the html files to the outside server. So now I've turned off the inside server. How cool is that? October 4, 2005: The most noticeable change is that we outgrew the listener limit of 350 when it maxed out 3 times last week so I've bumped it up to 400. Over the months I've added 21st Precinct to Police Stories, Boston Blackie and Rogues Gallery to Detective and completely replaced all 130 Magic Island episodes with high-quality audio and titled episodes from Jerry Haendiges's collection. About half of the 510 The Great Gildersleeve shows will be replaced by HQ versions by the end of the week. This particular upgrade will also go to WFEL 99.9 FM since it has a dedicated Gildersleeve segment every day at 8PM. Hear it for miles around Antioch in beautiful FM quality by sometime next week. July 30, 2005: Replaced the 120GB drive with a 250GB. The upgrade took the station off the air for just an hour today from 3 to 4 PM. July 26, 2005: Over 100 HQ additions or replacements done across almost every category including two new shows Candy Matson to Detective and Old Gold Comedy Theater to Matinee Theater. July 15, 2005: Virtual Radio, a mobile phone application and service, now offers AM 1710. July 9, 2005: You lucky folks in downtown Antioch who get to hear it over the air just got a nice boost. Our sound is much more comparable to the big boys now with a processor I'm borrowing from KA9VZD. The bass in the voice is much more enhanced and the levels are at least 5db higher on average with no more and maybe even less of a processed sound. This also translates to better range. May 20, 2005: You can now help support the station by making a donation through Pay Pal by using the Make a Donation button on the left and/or by purchasing licenses for any MacinMind Software products. I'm going to run the audio ad-free and continue to meet all listener demand for the stream. For your reference, currently the stream itself costs $2,100 a year. TIA for any help. May 17, 2005: I turned off the introduction when you first connect on the stream b/c of one report of it playing every few minutes. It's probably due to a connection problem somewhere but IMHO there's no sense in compounding problems for anyone. May 9, 2005: The newest news is we outgrew the 250 listener limit so it's been bumped up to 350. More new shows integrated since January, a few of them just higher-quality replacements. Other changes since January are that some shows that may not have time fit before have a better chance since I allow up to a 1 minute overrun when scheduling so the last seconds of a show might be faded and ended. For the most part I've not heard any loss of critical portions of shows so this seems to be a good compromise. There's now an intro on the stream and a 'technical difficulties, please stand by' with waiting music if the source stream is somehow disconnected because of our good friends at SBC. Thanks so much for the overwhelming emails of thanks. I'm sorry I can no longer respond to them all but I do read them all. Want to help justify my hobby to my wife? Then please try out and support our software if you like it. January 16, 2005: Fast-serv.com will be performing upgrades between 3:00 AM and 7AM on Sunday Jan 23. Their current server, which I've been on for the past few months, has been very reliable and their flexibility in changing the number of connections very quickly is very much appreciated. While I'm at it, I must commend OTR-shop.com [Edit 2007: now gone and out of business] for the quality of their shows and particularly for their customer service when I did encounter problems. Nearly 1,000 shows in our library came from them. January 12, 2005: We're now in the iTunes radio listing. Welcome to all of you who have just discovered us through iTunes. Also, lightened-up the processing a bit on the Mac now that I have a dbx 166XL processor in-line to the transmitter. The processing is now a bit heavier on AM than on the stream as it should be. January 8, 2005: Fast-serv suddenly stopped service with no warning yesterday because of a problem on their end getting a renewal email to me and me then obviously not resubscribing. So it was down for over 13 hours for that reason. I took the opportunity to give up on getting listed on Apple's iTunes Radio since fast-serv presented me with the dillemma of paying for far more than I need or sizing down for more modest growth. Apparently Mystery Play I-radio is more to Apple's liking right now but if they change their mind I'll meet any listener demand required to support that. January 6, 2005: I've added a good chunk of new HQ episodes for a few detective shows, Family Theater, and Fibber McGee & Molly. In the case of Fibber McGee, I've manually chosen the best from a few sources and completely deleted those shows that don't sound good. There are more HQ replacements on the way. WFEL-LP 99.9 FM went on the air on December 8th. It has an approximate 8 mile range with the center in downtown Antioch. It will not stream because of the costs of a high-quality stream and the cost of royalties for much of the music.You can hear OTR on this station now from 7-9PM and most all of it is very high quality. Later OTR will air more permanently every day from 7:30 - 9:30 PM. OTR, classical and sermons run on another B&W Mac for WFEL while the rest of the day is run by TuneTracker on Zeta OS. I'll put up a link for this station's site once the final schedule is approved. November 1, 2004: Fixed the today's date selector so that for dates like October 30th, it gets 411030 but not 410307. Also gave the date selector the ability to select proper dates regardless of when they were last played. This also allows me to restrict the regular selector to less recently played shows without changing the available pool of material for today's date selection. The result should be that you will see more of today's date selected and a much shorter cycle for repeats for days that don't match today's date in all categories. October 29, 2004: I changed the schedule a bit and decided that I would make it a daily instead of weekly since I never was able to memorize the weekly. I also added the two 1930's long serials Speed Gibson and Magic Island. Speed Gibson will run about 3 months and Magic Island about 2 months playing 2 episodes each day. Hopefully this will all work well since it is newly programmed. I'm hoping for no glitches in the rewritten schedule but if there is I'll have it worked out quickly. October 13, 2004: The suspense is that I'm hoping to get listed in the iTunes radio directory but so far that has not happened. If it does not happen, I'll reduce to a number of connections that is more suitable for the current peaks with some headroom. I've had a bit more time to listen to my own station and do some of that weeding. Although practically everything I have has been sampled and a good chunk of it is also from very trusted high-quality sources, my earlier collections leave something to be desired. It isn't evident from sampling beginnings and middles that some moron would actually record in his AOL "Welcome" and "You've got mail!" sounds into the mp3 file "Inner Sanctum - 450904 The Murder Prophet". Needless to say this is sad and embarassing so I've commented this on the file and removed it from being played again. I can understand quality issues with some files because of the age and technology limits of their time but such mistakes in modern times are inexcusable. My computer is guaranteed not to be the source of AOL sounds, modems dialing, and Windows welcome music! :-). This is running on a Mac. If you ever hear such a thing, let me know so I can remove the file and seek a replacement. In any case, the content will continue to improve over this winter as I've also got a good programming idea that will probably be a unique one, at least for modern times. Thanks for all the nice comments and signal reports! September 30, 2004: The only thing to stop the OS X Server thus far has been my own restarting or power outages. The only thing to stop the stream in the past few weeks is stupid me unplugging the router by accident. These are the kind of outages I can live with because I can blame myself for them! The Blue and White G3 has now run for 56 days straight playing iTunes, real-time audio processing, scheduling, encoding, serving, etc. and is completely automated needing no maintenance at all. Maybe you noticed the new listener limit is set to 250. Yes that is for real. Wonder why? I'll let you know in a few days unless you already figured it out. July 6, 2004: Only occasional problems with the upstream provider on Sunday into Monday this week. To their credit, SBC has made good by crediting me hundreds for all my troubles the first half of this year. No major maintenance the past few weeks as the station runs itself mostly unmonitored as I delve into programming other software and organizing classical music for the upcoming LPFM station WFEL 99.9 in Antioch. I'd like to thank Bob Merritt of microstation AM 600 in Conyers, GA for his musical contributions to the music fillers and 40's music hour. June 13, 2004: New features: 1. Shows that aired on today's date are now preferred by the scheduler. However, shows that may match the current date that have already played within the past month or two won't be repeated. I did reduce the length of time for repeats to allow more of today's date shows to be considered for this new feature. 2. Shows are automatically scheduled 15 minutes before the segment begins and the playlist is also published 15 minutes ahead of play time. June 6, 2004: It's the 60th anniversary of D-Day. I find full broadcast days just incredibly interesting. I'm really transported to the past and in some ways I get just a bit of an eerie feeling. Enjoy today's material. The source material keeps getting better. Yet I wouldn't be so stupid as to make the pretentious marketing claim that I'm playing 'The Best OTR Online". Some of what I have is probably better. But my collection can still use work and seeing as I've been accussed of being a perfectionist, I'll keep finding things to fix. A few growing pains the past few days with using the new provider, and me working in the Library while the station is live, caused the short disconnects here and there. But quality selection is done for all Frontier, most Detective. Also added Black Museum, Philo Vance, and Space Patrol. Thanks to the logs and AppleScript with iTunes incredible capabilities, recataloging and titling this material is feasible. I've put in a request for Nicecast to support 16KHz sampling since I think this would be and very good ratio for 24Kbps and would best emulate AM sound and get rid of those annoying artifacts that sometimes appear when there is siginificant hiss in the source material. Put a hybrid solid-state/tube line-level pre-amp and limiter inline from the Mac to the transmitter. This boosted the audio level enormously, increased the range, and also allowed me to lighten the compression and volume for internet users. Good for everyone and would you believe I had this thing sitting around from recording tons of sentences for Master Spell and never thought to use it? The talking house on 1610 went away but now 1610 is occupied by Wisconsin Dept. of Transportation so they can give a 5-second message that tells you, "This is the Wisconsin Department of Transportation". Sure, I have 280 days of material to put on the air and they have 5 seconds. Which would you rather hear? So I'm sticking with 1710 even though some radios don't go there. May 29, 2004: Now supporting 30 connections at 24Kbps The emphasis is on quality without changing the quantity much. Fixed the following collections: Avalon Time, Ozzie and Harriet, Red Skelton, Roy Rogers, Six Shooter, Family Theater, Police Headquarters, Broadway is My Beat. Removed Crime Does Not Pay since the quality of the collection I have doesn't pay either. Replaced Amos and Andy with My Favorite Husband. Added Duffy's Tavern. Completely replaced Dimension X and Dragnet with high-quality. Added and replaced parts of collection with high-qualty for Mysterious Traveler, Broadway is My Beat, Night Beat, Philip Marlowe, You Bet Your Life, Abbott and Costello, Ozzie and Harriet, Calling All Cars, Counter Spy, Gangbusters, Inner Sanctum, Richard Diamond, This is Your FBI, and X Minus One. Removed the Hero category for a while until I get it in better shape. Frontier Stories will take the place in the schedule Quite a few of my collections are now from as many as 4 sources and are combined together and resolved with various logs to make them better quality and more complete than any of the single sources. The weak spots are still many in the Hero and Frontier categories. These will get more work soon. On June 6th, listen for a complete day recorded from D-day, from 60 years ago, June 6, 1944. May 14, 2004: Quite a few OTR mp3s in circulation are very poor quality, not because there isn't a better source but because of bad decisions at the digital stage and very many are from mult-generational tapes besides. I've heard people's modems, Windows and AOL welcome sounds, clipping and distortion, endings being different shows, 5 minutes of tailing silence, nasty encoding glitches and simply really bad decisions about matching bit rates and sample rates to produce awful sounding results such as 44KHz sampling with 32Bps. I have over a year's worth of material so it would take a few years to completely listen to it all. I'm taking more measures to improve things here by acquiring much higher quality shows while taking bad shows out of rotation. Once in a while I'll edit the mp3 files if I can get a better result. I've also put some time into fixing files that had no ID3 information and apparently went through old DOS/Windows 8 character truncation at some point on WinFS CDs or something. Nevermind that ISO9660 CD format has supported longer names since at least 1995, probably earlier. That said, Quiet Please episodes are now in the Mystery rotation. Many of these recordings were not discovered until the 80's and many of them are not in good shape. But I have some of the best possible of these now. All 52 Box 13 episodes are now excellent quality and I've replaced some Dragnet and Life of Riley. I've listened to all Aldrich family shows and resolved their proper titles and dates with a log. May 7, 2004: DSL is now on a clean phone line, but it wasn't easy. SBC would not fix the line noise on the phone line so I decided to disconnect the line and move the DSL to my main number which was also noisy and SBC wouldn't fix it either until it went dead on Jan. 1. The main number is clean. SBC scheduled the transfer of DSL from one number to the other on April 13 and the disconnect of the old DSL phone number on April 14. On April 14, they disconnected the phone line but couldn't move the DSL to the other line for 10 more days. They also couldn't bring back DSL on the old line. They left themselves no provision for the error they made so I ran dial-up for 10 days. I at least got credit for two months of service but they couldn't give me my old fast speed back but I do have reasonable speed for a much better price now. The story is much longer and worse than this but I won't bother you with it. Don't use SBC is the moral of the story. The DSL connection has stayed solid now for weeks at a time so I've started the streaming again, this time at 16Kbps for 8 connections. If it gets more popular, I may increase the maximum number of connections. January 26, 2004: I've switched to 1710 from 1610 since a real estate agent has seen fit to occupy 1610 for 1/2 mile radius to advertise a house for rent. I don't want to compete so I chose 1710 for now at least. Range is better with a new transmitter and antenna. I've turned off radio streaming until the SBC connection improves. Currently I get disconnected several times a day. January 5, 2004: Now I've been around the block with SBC. After they reduced my speed, I lost my voice service a couple days later. Since then I've had the corroded line fixed down the street and then a few days later after monitoring the DSL connection, asked to have the speed restored. Also received some new shows a couple days ago: Spy Catcher, Counterspy, Calling all Cars, Gangbusters, and Molle Mystery Theater have been added to the lineup. Several others will make their way in at later dates. December 20, 2003: BAD DSL again. After running okay for 36 hours, it went down losing 7 listeners yesterday afternoon. SBC's solution was to slow down the connection about 75% of what it was including slowing my upstream which they wouldn't admit. Guess what, it still disconnects. So I can't guarantee anything for the time being. If it goes down, my IP number changes and Nicecast currently doesn't correct for this although the ip name does get updated. I'm also having line noise including hearing other people's phones when I use the voice side so I think I need the line repaired and then I'll tell the DSL side to bump the speed back up. I'm just a block away from the the phone building so I should be able to get some phenomenal speeds back. December 18, 2003: After a few days of a bad DSL connection I waited till it could stay connected for 24 hours before making the station more publicly listed. Things seem to be solid now. I've chosen 24Kbps for now with a 10 connection limit. December 10, 2003: Processor is now 900MHz and RAM is now 512MB. Nicecast is updated to 1.0. As a trial I'm going to run 32Kbps 22KHz for 10 connections for a while December 6, 2003: Still slowly correcting bad titles and excluding programs of poor audio quality from playlist consideration, this will be a long-term project. If you see the current track displayed as "iTunes" this means I'm running an Applescript to fix titles in batch. On a trade I will be receiving (someday) several more shows that I hope to incorporate into the mix next week. If quality is good, the shows will be Gangbusters, Molle Mystery Theater, Frank Race, I Love a Mystery, 2000 Plus, Counterspy, Spy Catcher, Calling All Cars. And for fun, I'll see if I can get my software to help fill segments with old commercials later too. On Dec. 7, will do a software update to the server so there may be some downtime. Later in the week, will upgrade processor to 900MHz G3, upgrade OS to Mac OS X 10.3 and add RAM for a total of 512MB. November 21, 2003: The current iTunes playlist is now published on the front web page. Also today I received a complete and very meticulously collected Suspense collection from OTRNow which is already incorporated into the station. November 19, 2003: Just finished programming a new weekly schedule with the help of in-house software which now recognizes weekday programming and replaying programming segments. Also created a calendar you can subscribe to in iCal. See the new schedule