ABN Antioch is an Old-time Radio Shows station
located in Antioch, IL, a mile from the Wisconsin border and 20 miles
inland from Lake Michigan currently transmitting at 1610KHz. The AM
transmitter is a micro-power part15 AM RangeMaster1000 transmitter.
Range is very limited due to just 100mW of power and competition with
many distant stations but it is sufficient for all the antique and
crystal radios in the house and can be heard well by the near neighbors
if they care.
About 16,000 shows are reviewed and approved to be automatically scheduled out of the whole library
which has about 70,000 as mp3 and about 30,000 on reel tape with considerable duplication between the two.
The source of the playout runs on an M1 Mac Mini which has the job of
scheduling and playing all shows. Scheduling playlists and voice work concatenation is done by
custom in-house software Radiologik OTR which I first created in 2003. It uses Apple's Music app for the library and playlists,
Radiologik DJ for the playing of audio, and Audio HiJack for the audio processing, mp3 encoding and sending to the server.
Library Selection:
Collections are merged from various
sources. As of 2018, these sources include recently digitized reel tapes.
From that I compare and make judgements on air-worthiness, fix and adjust
audio to remove hum, reduce hiss, trim, speed-correct, and EQ. I confirm and identify and correct
episode names, dates and spellings where I can. Some misspellings by other collectors get past me sometimes.
Some collectors have already done their own
noise reduction giving a very artificial artifacted sound or gating.
For audio quality, I prefer hearing some surface noise to a loss of fidelity and I'd sometimes
prefer a more complete show if the audio is a little worse and
sometimes I'll even merge two files into one. When I do noise reduction I try to make sure
it doesn't become distracting. People's ears can adjust to a constant noise. When I get a chance, I
replace these if I have a better copy digitially or get the chance to get it myself from the reels.
Large collections take
years to listen to so this is an ongoing process. But I spot check
everything by listening to the first 30 seconds, sampling several
places in the middle and listening to the end. I sometimes have to
remove long annoying 30 second to 2 minute trailing silence. I've often
done pitch corrections and careful noise reduction where I can to
remove clicks and narrowband noise such as hum using notch filters and
low and high cut filters but where I have control over it I'm careful
not to make noise reduction a distraction such as with heavy noise
gates.
Getting a large collection isn't too difficult.
It's the work of sorting out a collection from multiple sources that
takes a lot of time. Even from the best "HQ" sources
there can be problems so having more than one HQ source is an
advantage. From the more commonly available mp3 sources I've heard the
worst examples of very bad
decisions at the digital stage such as encoding stereo at a mono bit
rate like 32Kbps stereo 22KHz sampling. I've heard noise reduction
techniques that make things sound underwater. I've heard AOL sign-in
and Windows desktop sounds (just lovely and embarrassing to hear played
on a Mac). I've heard mp3 encoding glitches that sound like hiccups.
I've heard large amounts of leading and trailing silence which is like
counting rings on a tree as I hear the different hiss sounds of many
generations of tape recordings. I've encountered lots of missing ID3
tags. I've encountered duplicate files just with different file names
claiming to be an episode they're not. I've heard audio drop-outs
consistently every few seconds for an entire 900-show Suspense
collection.
Scheduling and
Automation:
Scheduling of shows is an automated process where
shows are selected by the following priority:
Shows that match today's date that have not played recently
Shows that match today's date regardless of when they last played
Shows that match yesterday's date that haven't played recently
Shows that match the day before yesterday's date that haven't played
recently
Randomly selected shows that haven't played recently.
Where recently = a few months to a few years
depending on category. In the case of Comedy shows, this can be 2 to 3
years whereas with Spy Stories it can be just a couple months. Serials
just rotate.
The dates are read as a date object and audio is
concatenated to present an introduction of original play date including
the day of the week. Station IDs and an "Up Next" file are compiled
along with music fill.
Since we're matching today's date and since most
of you don't stay awake listening for 24 hours, there are replays of
several sub-genre segments across the day so you don't have to worry
about missing much.
When there's room at the end of a segment, we
fill with public domain classical music from musopen.com. Music track lengths that
perfectly fit the fill time needed are used when possible.
Audio Processing
First the tracks
are virtually normalized with the Music app Sound Check function. Radiologik DJ plays
the audio. Audio HiJack captures the audio and processes it for EQ, AGC, multiband compression, and peak limiting, and then encodes it to mp3 to send to the icecast server.
Delivery
The Mac updates the website with the current program segment, next program segment and the 4 days of programming. There are web players for desktop and mobile on this website. If you listen with some other service, you may hear modern advertising. Those services are the ones profiting from those ads. I would never want those ads nor do I profit from any modern ads. Antioch OTR is only there to increase exposure.
