ArtisanRadio

I just purchased a vintage transcription phonograph, capable of playing 16 inch transcriptions – it’s a Califone 6U-7C Executive II with a self contained tube amplifier. At first, it had a horrible hum, but its origin was tracked down to the AC outlet it was plugged into – I switched it to a different outlet, one on a separate circuit, and the hum was greatly reduced.

I also have hundreds of 16 inch transcriptions that have sat idle for some time.

Merge the two, and I will be doing digital encodes of most of them over the next while. Most old time radio programs have been determined to be in the public domain in both the U.S. and Canada (they’re considered differently than music), and I will be making the new encodes of these available on the ALPB website (exact manner to be determined).

Types of programs to be available: Guest Star (a lot of these), Philco Radio Time, Red Skelton, Country Hoedown (hey, I didn’t say that they were all classics) to name a few from the top of the pile that I just glanced at. While I don’t think that many (if any) are rare or not already available, I will be encoding them at relatively high bitrates, so the quality may be better than available encodes (many of which are low bitrates and low relatively quality). I don’t think I’ll do much audio processing, other than running them through an Audacity filter to get rid of whatever hum is remaining, as I find that too much processing actually reduces the quality of the original material.