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.

December 2, 2021

Added mugs, t-shirts and sweatshirts for sale through on-demand printing at Spring at minimal margins since I'm not doing this to raise money but just giving fans the opportunity to purchase Antioch OTR items. Visit the Antioch OTR Store. Later I hope to have a couple other items for sale directly, again at near cost so check back.

November 5, 2021

It took a bit longer than I expected but I finished listening to all of the new Challenge of the Yukon. We ended-up with 344 episodes, fully reviewed

This summer I finally made it to the Early TV Museum. I've read a lot about early TV but this museum still provided a lot of surprises for early innovations and products I didn't know existed as early as they did. There are a lot of rarities and several hundred, maybe thousands of museum pieces. It takes hours to go through this.

July 20, 2021

I'm more than halfway through listening to Challenge of the Yukon and fixes were needed such as mislabeled/duplicate episodes. There are certain things you can only find out by listening to them in their entirety. This will be fully reviewed in about a month.

Some disappointing news is that the IL reels already went elsewhere. I didn't expect to get them and then in March I was led to believe I would and then the family executors of the estate essentially deceived the lifelong friend of the deceased original owner and myself. I don't know why, maybe money, maybe some other reason, they won't say. Maybe they'll end up on eBay. I still have a good amount of mining I can do on the thousands of reels I have and I'm still getting upgrades and new sources so the collection will continue to improve. It's just too bad if wherever the IL reels went that whoever has them may not take interest or care in some of the more personal parts of that collection such as audio letters and recordings of the ORCATS net on the ham bands over many years that would be of interest to people like me who were a part of it for many years.

June 27, 2021

Added 384 346 episodes of Challenge of the Yukon, finally returning this program after collecting good audio without hiccups. It will air in Frontier Stories along with the Lone Ranger schedule of Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Expect to hear 1 to 2 episodes of this per week with the first this Monday. I'm on a mission to listen to every second of these 384 346 episodes to make any final adjustments or repair and so far I've listened to 35 in their entirety. Sgt. Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his wonder dog King star in the adventures in the Yukon Territories during the gold rush of the late 1890's. It is very much angled toward dog lovers. Many times we get the hint that someone is a bad character if they don't like dogs.

Also added 42 episodes of Unit 99 to Police Stories. This is a reality police program much like Nightwatch but taking place in Sacramento, CA whereas Nightwatch is in Culver City, CA. These are 1950's radio predecessors to COPS and Live PD.

May 25, 2021

A new TV stream of early TV programs launched earlier this month. Classic Reruns TV. Unlike MeTV and Decades, they are playing many more of the older TV programs that overlap with OTR such as Life of Riley, Lone Ranger, Dragnet, Ozzie & Harriet, and many programs from the 1950s that I had never heard of. It's carried on several free to inexpensive streaming services such as DistroTV, KlowdTV, Select TV and Vidgo.

May 2, 2021

Heard in the cross-promo at the end of Broadway Is My Beat - May 2, 1953:

In the movie "Gone With The Wind" it cost $472,000 to burn down Atlanta. On Lux Radio Theatre it cost $27 plus the imagination of the listeners to 105 million radio sets. If you'd like to burn down a city to attract an audience, do it on radio and save $471,973.

And you can enjoy a glass of Roma wine in 2021 while listening to Suspense.

April 9, 2021

I finally finished the episode number cleanup on Suspense so they all have episode numbers and they are all updated to the consensus I see. Besides that I've only upgraded a few episodes of various programs here and there in 2021 so it wasn't worth noting here. Most of my work has been for upcoming releases to archive.org which I'll announce when that is done.

I just updated the site to php 8 which required me to replace obsolete functions. I think everything is working for both desktop and mobile. Let me know if you see any trouble

Most exciting is that I expect to acquire the rest of the Illinois reel collection this summer. I acquired 10% of it back in August 2018. This collection is likely to have some rather unique things. This is rather exciting but it's going to require I rent storage. I have nearly 3,000 reels here now. It's difficult to envision having 9,000 without getting rid of something else.

January 11, 2021

I recently made two enhancements:

1. Episodes that are from the reel collection are now announced as such.
2. For fill music, if it is possible to make a close to exact length fit with one track, that is now done.

December 1, 2020

After repeatedly trying to get OTRR to take my audio upgrades to incorporate in their collection, I've given up. I'm directly releasing the 122 episodes of Let George Do It that I digitized from reels and consider to be audio upgrades to what is in general circulation including from most dealers. The mp3 files that I've found everywhere else had encoding hiccups including from OTRR at archive.org so this solves that problem for at least these 122. It is NOT a complete collection. Use this to upgrade your collection yourself from OTRR @ archive.org or wherever else.

There is great news in the collaboration area: I've been busy digitizing a fraction of a recently released collection of reels along with several others doing the same with reels and disks to be eventually shared on archive.org. Of course many of these are being added to this station right away including episodes of Ozzie & Harriet, The Life of Riley and Phil Harris - Alice Faye.

November 23, 2020

I have over 40 reels of The Great Gildersleeve but just 12 of those have provided 116 audio upgrades to this 539 episode collection. This is the first time I've done any upgrades to this program in 15 years because I considered it to be good so it was nice to find I could improve it.

November 14, 2020

I appeared on the Storycomic Podcast to talk about the station, how I got into OTR and more.
Watch on YouTube

November 7, 2020

Added 7 to Counterspy with 5 from 1 reel. Upgraded 12 Phil Harris & Alice Faye from 1 reel. Upgraded 11 Suspense from 2 reels. Added 2 Box 13. Added 66 Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar with with 15 from 2 reels. Added 27 episodes of a new program The Saint to Detective from 3 reels.

About 4,000 episodes or 25% have been reviewed, new or updated in 2020, over 11,000 or 69% in the last 3 years with 2,012 or 12% from reels. About 446 reels or 17% of the total reel collection has been digitized.

October 23, 2020

Added 13 and upgraded 7 of Nick Carter, Master Detective from 2 reels. Upgraded 6 Philip Marlowe from 1 reel. Performed a full audit and replacement of Fibber McGee and Molly bringing it from 470 to 518 total air-worthy episodes.

October 15, 2020

From 5 reels, upgraded 38 and added 22 to Fibber McGee and Molly for many of the early 50's episodes with Pet Milk and Reynolds Aluminum.

October 6, 2020

Added 50 episodes of Inheritance to Matinee Theater. This program dramatizes historical stories of the United States heritage. Many of these stories probably stopped being taught in schools decades ago. Performed an audit of Sam Spade taking it from 51 to 59 episodes with 8 additions from reels.

September 10, 2020

Just performed an audit and merge from several sources to Inner Sanctum bringing it from 70 to 118 playable episodes, but only getting 7 from reels so far. Also upgraded 57 of The Weird Circle with just 2 from reels.

September 2, 2020

Finished Dragnet with 71 upgrades from reels. Upgraded 7 Rocky Jordan. Upgraded 2 Phil Harris & Alice Faye from another reel I just found. I have 2 sets of 7-reel collections of Quiet Please. I've digitized one of these sets and started from scratch rebuilding Quiet Please so far to 43 episodes, 41 from these reels.

August 18, 2020

Just did some touchup work to Dragnet upgrading 36 episodes with 35 of those from the reels, and removed 12 poor quality audio episodes for which I could not yet find a better copy. I have at least 35 Dragnet reels and I'm digitizing them all but taking a targeted approach to replacing. The Dragnet collection was originally acquired in 2004 from a premier source that disappeared about that long ago. I also upgraded 11 Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons from 1 reel I missed last time through.

August 12, 2020

I've received confirmations that Antioch OTR is again available on C.Crane and Grace Digital WiFi radios so if you have one of those and don't get Antioch OTR now, try doing a search again for "Antioch". With all the trouble of getting these directories to update, I must also mention who was most responsive and helpful: C.Crane has terrific service and personally made sure this was done right with the Reciva directory when Reciva ignored me for a week. The ooTunes app on iOS updated details so quickly that it was already corrected within hours if not minutes.

I just did another upgrade to Broadway is My Beat with 27 either new or upgraded audio bringing it to 135 total. And I did a major upgrade to The Phil Harris - Alice Faye Show taking it from 75 to 215 episodes with 194 either new or upgraded audio while also moving it to Comedy Shows.

Wisconsin Public Radio has determined that "Despite significant effort over the years, it has been nearly impossible to find historic programs without offensive and outdated content. " so they are removing all OTR programming from their stations. Anecdotally, many listeners have told me OTR is their alternative to offensive present day entertainment.

August 3, 2020

TuneIn is updated and working this afternoon. Grace Digital and Reciva directories should also be updated now or very soon. I released Antioch Rebroadcaster 1.0.10 with the updated stream address.

Burns and Allen is upgraded from 89 to 249 episodes using 5 sources. I started with over 1,200 files. Only 6 were not replaced or new and I was only able to use 9 from reels. I started this project nearly 2 years ago but got bogged-down in it and then forgot about it until recently picking it back up a couple weeks ago.

August 1, 2020

Our stream host changed the IP address at 5 AM. I caught this at about 6:30 AM and changed what needed changing that I could. I've been expecting the change but I was under the impression by the stream host emails that there would be a crossover period. I must have misunderstood that I needed to switch my input to the new address to get the output to switch too. It was not possible to have both active for the transition. The main problem now is that TuneIn had to be notified. I did this at 7 AM. At 11 PM, they haven't done anything yet. Sorry. This just shows that the little guys are far more responsive than the big guys. If you can, just use the mobile website here where you get more information anyway that TuneIn just can't find a way to allow without also including inappropriate art.

The new address is: http://107.182.226.11:8000/listen
The playlist file @ http://radio.macinmind.com/listen.m3u always points to the correct address.

In the pipeline is a big Burns & Allen upgrade which I should have done in less than a week.

July 1, 2020

There are other OTR stations on the internet and one that I can recommend for audio quality and for a wide variety is Conyers OTR. Bob and I started our stations about the same time and have been in contact, cooperating and sharing for 16 years to make both our stations better. Not long ago, Conyers OTR began running on the Mac software I created so that it has date matching and is on a nicely structured schedule. Bob is not yet utilizing the full functionality but hopes to soon. He makes up for it by providing a wider variety than Antioch. Think of us as a blue and red network like what NBC did. If you don't like what's on Antioch OTR at some particular time, be sure to try out Conyers OTR.

July 2 update: I just added 14 of The Jack Paar Show, 12 from reels.

Those in the U.S.: Celebrate the 4th as best you can. Read the document that started it.

April 18, 2020

Just finished Suspense upgrades from 3,600 source files to give us 696 upgrades and a new total of 885 episodes after removing some that were not good enough. That's 78% replaced. Most are much better and some are marginally better. Not every Suspense episode is going to be spectacular audio quality but all of them should be good enough to enjoy. Having listened to so much Suspense over the past 3 weeks, it's apparent to me now that Joseph Kearns (Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace) seems to have made it into nearly every episode.

Suspense was one of the first high quality seeds of this station when I purchased the complete Suspense from OTRNow versions 1.0 and upgraded to 2.0 back in 2004. Rick from OTRNow noted he had spent 5 years already getting it to this condition. In my mind this was not a collection that needed my attention but after 16 years, it was in fact far past time for attention.

This brings us to 2,080 upgrades or additions in 2020 alone and more than 10,000 (2/3 of the station) new or upgraded in the past 5 years.

April 3, 2020

Upgraded audio for 363 Suspense episodes and to highlight this, I've added Suspense to 11 PM, moving The Whistler to 1 AM. You'll know the upgraded Suspense episodes by them being the first to include episode numbers (e.g. "Jul 5, 1945: (148) The Last Detail w/George Colouris") before I do this for the entire collection later. Also replaced all Secret Agent K7 Returns from 2 reels taking it from 35 to 42 episodes.

March 26, 2020

Upgraded 24 Big Town from 3 reels. Upgraded 17 of The Line-Up from 2 reels. Upgraded all 26 Michael Shayne. Added 14 Dr. Sixgun to Frontier Stories. Performed an audit and edit with 18 upgrades from 2 reels to Dark Fantasy. Upgraded 6 of The Weird Circle from 2 reels. Upgraded 31 Crime Club. Took My Favorite Husband from 26 to 54 with 42 upgraded including 5 from 1 reel. Some upgrades may not be spectacular audio but realize that the general circulation of these episodes is unlistenable and the copies I've retrieved are far better presentable improvements.

My Favorite Husband is a very good funny sitcom. It stars Lucille Ball but I find it much better than I Love Lucy. Liz has the sardonic wit of Our Miss Brooks in more of an Ozzie and Harriet setting.

March 16, 2020

Took Rocky Jordan from 38 to 81 episodes with 73 new or replaced of which 25 came from 7 reels

March 13, 2020

Added 52 Damon Runyon Theater to Matinee Theater, all from reels. Performed audits and additions to Hall of Fantasy (15 from reels) and Murder at Midnight.

March 10, 2020

Took Dangerous Assignment from 44 to 94 playable episodes with 92 of them coming from 8 reels. This is again far better audio quality than general circulation. Dangerous Assignment was a popular program on NBC even though it is not one of the most cherished due to somewhat predictable plots. With lower expectations, I still found it very enjoyable, especially in the higher audio quality. You'll hear Dangerous Assignment in Spy Stories.

The total programs in the ABN broadcast library is now over 15,000. Over 10% of the ABN broadcast library is now sourced by me from the reels. Over 13% of the total reel collection has now been digitized.

March 5, 2020

There was an outage at the streaming host provider in the early morning. My silence sensor wasn't working properly (now fixed) so I didn't find out until someone emailed me. Once I knew and contacted the provider, it was fixed in 5 minutes. The streaming host is dealing with a lot of issues related to the Chrome 80 move to only support https streams.

Where the Mac has been solid without a reboot sometimes for years, it started freezing about every 2 months in 2019. Investigating the root cause, I came up with a theory based on timing and error messages and some internet searching that it might be the Dell display connected to it which I put on it as a replacement last year when I needed a DVI display for a panadapter ham radio project. So after the last freeze on January 8, 2020, I put a different display on this Mac and so far we've gone 57 days so I'll find out soon if that's the solution. Last time between freezes was 60 days.

March 4, 2020

Performed an audit and upgrades to Pat Novak For Hire. We end up with only 20 playable episodes but 6 of those came from reels made in the early 1970's and the quality from the reels is better than 7 other sources I was working with.

February 29, 2020

Just completed major additions to Calling All Cars taking it from 30 to 211 episodes, 100 of which came from 23 freshly digitized reels. In the nearterm, you will hear this program in Police Stories much more often due to the large number of unplayed episodes. Calling All Cars ran from 1933 to 1939 in western states and the stories have a striking depth for programs of this time period. It is something of a Dragnet forerunner but with different police officers for each episode. Don't discount this program for its age.

With the release of Chrome 80 and the new requirement of no mixed secure and non-secure content, I've added https streaming to the players for this site.

February 22, 2020

Just completed a big audio upgrade to Family Theater replacing nearly all episodes and bringing the total number of playable episodes up from 374 to 523. The first of this plays this Sunday. There are a lot of good stories and they aren't as long as Lux Radio. But do I have to add not advocating the use of LSD to my disclaimer? In the episode June 5, 1957 (526) The Acid Test, in need of extra money, a girl gets paid as a research subject and her life is changed for the better by the use of LSD. Oh my!

Also just finished an audit with audio upgrades to Counterspy although the total playable episodes remains at 78. On deck (literally being digitized from the reel deck right now) is Calling All Cars. Before this upcoming upgrade, I only have 30 playable episodes. But I have over 20 reels to digitize and the first listen of these sounds promising. We should end up with hundreds playable.

February 9, 2020

Kirk Douglas, who just passed away Feb 5, 2020 at the age of 103, stars in today's Suspense - The Butcher's Wife.

Journal entries 2019 and earlier

Stream Address:
http://stream.radio.macinmind.com:8000/listen Copy

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:

1. Shows that match today's date that have not played recently
2. Shows that match today's date regardless of when they last played
3. Shows that match yesterday's date that haven't played recently
4. Shows that match the day before yesterday's date that haven't played recently
5. 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.