another successful 8-track Thursday at WQMA 1520 AM !

well the 8-track Thursday on WQMA just ended- and what a great show it
was !

many mentions again for Noah Cope and yours truly- and more tapes and
songs played than I can remember ! Only one breakage I heard of was a
Foreigner tape.

the 8-track player is still humming away nicely for Jason and Jennifer
!

I think I sent them that Foreigner tape. I kinda half-expected that to
happen. I hope I remembered to warn him about it...

I tried to listen, but could not get my computer to stream...

On 1 Sep 2005 14:19:49 -0700, wrote:

I think I sent them that Foreigner tape. I kinda half-expected that to
happen. I hope I remembered to warn him about it...

I tried to listen, but could not get my computer to stream... snip

Who cares? You can't hear much over a 32 kb/s mp3PRO compressed feed
on dial-up at 56 kB/s, anyway. Webcasts are just a waste of time to
me, anyway...low quality, horrid reliability, flaky servers. The
major networks are finding this out too, and have already cut back
news feeds and other actuaries on their websites. Having DSL or cable
TDMA helps a lot and allows a higher bitrate, but dumps and freezes
are still the rule, not the exception. The Internet backbone was NOT
designed for real-time delivery...never was, never will be. That's
another eason why VoIP will not succeed. Once people compare its
crappy reliability and quality to real telecommunications facilities
(not cellular, which is almost as bad), the choice is obvious, even
though VoIP is almost free. If it were all that good, Vonage and the
cell providers would be hot stocks right now. They aren't.

dB

yes it was your tape- but he also played all your other tapes as well,
and all those others played ok- and mentioned your name for every song-
also your 8-track dealings.

I fast forward all the donation tapes to the channel switch here, and
change/reinforce the splice/sensing foil- then test each one in my
Pioneer HR-99. If they make any shuttling/squealing noises, or they
drag at all- I open them up and lube them. If they will play in that
Pioneer, they'll play in the Craig deck I sent down- as both have the
small DC motors.

wonder if he got his other deck up and running ?

On Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:50:00 -0700, DeserTBoB
wrote:

Who cares? You can't hear much over a 32 kb/s mp3PRO compressed feed
on dial-up at 56 kB/s, anyway. Webcasts are just a waste of time to
me, anyway...low quality, horrid reliability, flaky servers.

What a poo-poo attitude about online streaming! Nothing in life is
guaranteed 100% perfect.

I can tell you that you can listen to hours without a glitch. And yes,
you can occasionally run into a gap or skip too.

But remember tuning in distant AM/FM signals? Sometimes you might get
a little fuzz. Depending on the show and your determination, you might
sit through a program with a lot of static. Nothing is perfect.

A lot of people use our station for the special weekend programming.
Things like Dr. Demento really attract a lot of folks worldwide. We
get emails from Germany thanking us for Casey Kasem, or Chile thanking
us for adding Wolfman Jack. US soldiers overseas tell us they miss
Steve & DC in the morning and enjoy hearing them on our station. We
receive regular weekly reports from these diehard fans that record
certain shows in CD quality (from the higher quality feed) and let us
know each and everytime it skips or stutters. Usually it's pretty
good.

Much better to hear 98% of a good show from WQMA than get stuck with
whatever the stations you have locally decide to provide you with if
you want better. Music is a big part of our station, but it's also the
5 star personalities (I'm not referring to me!)

Jason

Jason,

I agree wholeheartedly- I listen to your show via streamer MP3 link in
STEREO with my headphones on- and it sounds better than my local
stations do on the radio- yours has no background interference. There
is also a monaural streamer, but the stereo sounds better of course.

The alternative is, I can only hear AM or FM radio for about a 30 mile
radius, because this is a mountainous area. With the streamer, I'm
getting an AM Mississippi station that is about a thousand miles away ?
No contest- the streamer is AWESOME !

Who ever is dissing the streamer link, obviously never listened to it-
or doesn't know how. Perhaps he's deaf, insane, or both ?
(chuckle...)

keep up the great work and great 8-track show,

Charlie N.

On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 14:03:04 GMT, (Jason K)
wrote:

What a poo-poo attitude about online streaming! Nothing in life is
guaranteed 100% perfect. snip

"Poo-poo???" LMAO!

I can tell you that you can listen to hours without a glitch. And yes,
you can occasionally run into a gap or skip too. snip

It depends on backbone traffic. If traffic light, streams can run OK.
If traffic backs up or there's a facility slip or failure, it's over.
It's still low bit rate, though.

But remember tuning in distant AM/FM signals? Sometimes you might get
a little fuzz. Depending on the show and your determination, you might
sit through a program with a lot of static. Nothing is perfect. snip

Not really. I used to DX AM radio all the time, and sure, fades and
phase cancellation was part of that. But local market stations? No
way. If there was a 500 watter not too far from me I wanted to pull
in, just add more antenna! FM, once the FCC moved it up to 100
MHz after WWII, broadcast FM was dead for distant reception. Back
when it was down around 35 MHz, FM DXing was all the rage, but the big
AM networks, through political pressure, made the FCC force the new FM
stations up into the new 100 MHz band to eliminate competition.

A lot of people use our station for the special weekend programming.
Things like Dr. Demento really attract a lot of folks worldwide. We
get emails from Germany thanking us for Casey Kasem, or Chile thanking
us for adding Wolfman Jack. US soldiers overseas tell us they miss
Steve & DC in the morning and enjoy hearing them on our station. We
receive regular weekly reports from these diehard fans that record
certain shows in CD quality (from the higher quality feed) and let us
know each and everytime it skips or stutters. Usually it's pretty
good. snip

Your programming, I think, is the future of AM. Right wing talk radio
is dying, over 50% drop in ratings in the last Arbitron period
nationwide, so these properties will need to be entertaining again to
draw an audience. The program mix you have looks great!

Much better to hear 98% of a good show from WQMA than get stuck with
whatever the stations you have locally decide to provide you with if
you want better. Music is a big part of our station, but it's also the
5 star personalities (I'm not referring to me!) snip

"Personality" radio died when the mega corporations started taking
over all broadcast properties in the US. "Personality" radio is what
kept AM great for all those years, and even the AOR FMs had their own
personalities. When Infinity and Clear Channel gobbled up the US
radio industry with a weak-kneed FCC commissioner helping them, a lot
of that completely died. It's good to see it's coming back again.

dB

Jason K wrote:

On Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:50:00 -0700, DeserTBoB
wrote:

Who cares? You can't hear much over a 32 kb/s mp3PRO compressed feed
on dial-up at 56 kB/s, anyway. Webcasts are just a waste of time to
me, anyway...low quality, horrid reliability, flaky servers.

What a poo-poo attitude about online streaming! Nothing in life is
guaranteed 100% perfect.

I can tell you that you can listen to hours without a glitch. And yes,
you can occasionally run into a gap or skip too.

But remember tuning in distant AM/FM signals? Sometimes you might get
a little fuzz. Depending on the show and your determination, you might
sit through a program with a lot of static. Nothing is perfect.

A lot of people use our station for the special weekend programming.
Things like Dr. Demento really attract a lot of folks worldwide. We
get emails from Germany thanking us for Casey Kasem, or Chile thanking
us for adding Wolfman Jack. US soldiers overseas tell us they miss
Steve & DC in the morning and enjoy hearing them on our station. We
receive regular weekly reports from these diehard fans that record
certain shows in CD quality (from the higher quality feed) and let us
know each and everytime it skips or stutters. Usually it's pretty
good.

Much better to hear 98% of a good show from WQMA than get stuck with
whatever the stations you have locally decide to provide you with if
you want better. Music is a big part of our station, but it's also the
5 star personalities (I'm not referring to me!)

Jason
what really ticks me off about the modern method of "streaming" is that
there are a number of stations using non-standard ways of streaming their
content requiring special applications for the client side just to be able
to listen to their content. that is not really considered streaming. not
too long ago, every webcaster used standard ways of streaming which would
give the users their choice of media player to use & quite often, the
stream would work accross all platforms, including linux, unix, freebsd,
netbsd, etc.
this is what made sites like shoutcast quite successful. they stream mp3 &
ogg-vorbis
now, it appears that there are a few stations (including WQMA) that recently
got into webcasting using non-conventional ways of streaming & in all
cases, work on only one platform, (microsoft windows).

i use linux. i will never use microsoft windows to access the internet. the
internet was intended for all platforms to use, not just microsoft.

the streaming P-2-P service that your station uses sucks because of what was
mentioned above. also, it sucks because it requires running a server on the
client side. there are quite a few service providers who will get really
anal about the extra bandwidth being used. also, it is against most
broadband internet service providers terms of service to run servers on
their residential broadband service.
the streamer client would never be allowed on a corporate network because
most corporate IT departments have a policy in place prohibiting the use of
P2P clients on any of their workstations.

i have already tried to install Streamer in WINE. allthough the gui appears
to work, it cannot connect because the API for it's networking does not
work in WINE.

please ask your station manager to consider opening a raw mp4 stream or
providing a alternate stream through shoutcast.
--
i have an 8 track mind

My other computer is your XP box.

On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:04:26 -0400, 8 tracker from hell
wrote:

now, it appears that there are a few stations (including WQMA) that recently
got into webcasting using non-conventional ways of streaming & in all
cases, work on only one platform, (microsoft windows). snip

Gee...I wonder who planned that? I smell something foul...like Billy
Gates!

the streaming P-2-P service that your station uses sucks because of what was
mentioned above. also, it sucks because it requires running a server on the
client side. there are quite a few service providers who will get really
anal about the extra bandwidth being used. snip

Mine goes ballistic about these things.

i have already tried to install Streamer in WINE. allthough the gui appears
to work, it cannot connect because the API for it's networking does not
work in WINE. snip

"Streamer" was created to sell more WinBlowz crap, not to be a
universal netcasting app.

please ask your station manager to consider opening a raw mp4 stream or
providing a alternate stream through shoutcast. snip

mp4 would be much better and offer good connectivity. Streamer blows.

dB

It depends on backbone traffic. If traffic light, streams can run OK.
If traffic backs up or there's a facility slip or failure, it's over.
It's still low bit rate, though.
Bob, time for you to throw out that tin can and strings
and sign up with a cable server. I run my olde HP Pavilion with streaming
audios from all kinds of sites while working on my company's bookkeeping
with never a pause in the feed. Sounds just fine. And that is without the
new fancy improved cable modem my provider keeps suggesting I come down and
pick up (free replacement) which I keep forgetting to do. Granted I am in a
fairly low populated area and maybe that is a factor. The Internet changed
(and will keep changing or become something entirely different), we all have
to move on.
WWW