WTFM 103.5 Lake Success, NY - 300 HOUR Stereo Reel-to-Reel 1966-1972 Easy Listening Aircheck Goldmine

[yeoldeschool]

I've just found a gigantic aircheck hoard.

"Hilda Sasson was an avid fan of WTFM Radio, which broadcast from Lake Success, NY in the 1960s and 1970s; to wit she tape-recorded (while her husband John, an avid listener himself, enjoyed her efforts) – mostly in stereo – approximately 300(!) hours of music as it was actually being broadcast by WTFM. Hilda kept in touch with, and gave over 125 WTFM air-check reel-to-reel tapes to two of the announcers – Charles Duval and Doug Eames (aka Doug Jeffers). As of this writing Doug Eames (Assisted by Daniel M) is in process of getting those tapes uploaded onto YouTube, where one can search for WTFM to see the latest uploads. Thank you, Hilda!!"

WTFM – FM Radio – Lake Success LI – 1966 thru 1972

Hilda Sasson was an avid fan of WTFM Radio, which broadcast from Lake Success, NY in the 1960s and 1970s; to wit she tape-recorded (while her husband John, an avid listener himself, enjoyed her efforts) – mostly in stereo – approximately 300(!) hours of music as it was actually being broadcast...

www.youtube.com

Sample video:

Edit: the one I rando-linked above was apparently recorded a little hot. Here's another one for reassurance:

 

[Alan Smithee]

Currently enjoying the aircheck I just shared here and don't want to kill the mood, but will definitely check these out. I hated that format with a passion back then, but now that it's long gone I kind of miss it. I've since learned the value of kitsch and enjoy listening to "elevator music" just for a good laugh- some of it is so cheesy you can't help but laugh even if there are no words in the songs, and some of it is admittedly very well-recorded. Some of it was meant for audiophiles who didn't actually like music, just good sound. KCTC was the main station in Sacramento with that format, it eventually flipped to adult contemporary which has stayed there ever since; the old format still got respectable ratings but it was hard to sell ad time when their target audience kept dying of old age! I have an 8-track tape recorded from rival KEWT 105.1 (which switched to country in 1984 and has also stayed there to this day) but sadly all the breaks are cut out.

 

[spiritof67]

This is not my kind of music. However, Hilda, and those who posted these recordings, are my kind of people. Those who recorded broadcasters on their home machines are the primary reasons we have the ability to hear these airchecks at all.

The reason why several hundred hours of the old NBC Monitor Beacon are available are due to the effort of one avid listener who rolled tape.

 

[Weiserguy]

My mom was fond of WTFM, and they put a solid signal into the near South Shore of Long Island, where we lived. So the station would be on one of the radios for hours at a time, and despite my best teenaged efforts, I was force-fed many of those hours (along with mom's tuna-noodle casserole). They actually were a good station from a production standpoint, if not necessarily a musical one, and most of their hours were live or live-assist, not automated. One of these days I'll have to travel back in time and listen to a few of those tapes.

One nit to pick: WTFM was licensed to Lake Success, just east of the NYC line in Queens, but the station itself broadcast from Fresh Meadows, on Horace Harding Boulevard (the access road for the Long Island Expressway) in eastern Queens. For awhile they transmitted from a tower at that same location before getting authorization to upgrade the transmitter to the Chrysler Building in Manhattan with a directional (largely eastward) antenna.

 

[RMarino]

I wish they had posted these to the internet archive so I could download them and listen offline.

 

[CentralFL]

My mom was fond of WTFM, and they put a solid signal into the near South Shore of Long Island, where we lived. So the station would be on one of the radios for hours at a time, and despite my best teenaged efforts, I was force-fed many of those hours (along with mom's tuna-noodle casserole). They actually were a good station from a production standpoint, if not necessarily a musical one, and most of their hours were live or live-assist, not automated. One of these days I'll have to travel back in time and listen to a few of those tapes.

One nit to pick: WTFM was licensed to Lake Success, just east of the NYC line in Queens, but the station itself broadcast from Fresh Meadows, on Horace Harding Boulevard (the access road for the Long Island Expressway) in eastern Queens. For awhile they transmitted from a tower at that same location before getting authorization to upgrade the transmitter to the Chrysler Building in Manhattan with a directional (largely eastward) antenna.

The modern incarnation of WTFM is WKTU. I think somehow they are now on the Empire non-directional, despite a station at 103.3 in Trenton, N.J.

 

[yeoldeschool]

I wish they had posted these to the internet archive so I could download them and listen offline.

You can download an entire Youtube channel automatically with the program yt-dlp. Here's a demo screenshot of me initiating a full channel download of the WTFM channel. I typed the command in red, and the rest began happening automatically without further intervention.



You do need to be comfortable with the Windows command line to use it. But the setup is relatively simple. All its components are open-source freeware. So if you would like to try:

1. Create a folder on your desktop (name it anything you want)

2. Into that folder, download the appropriate yt-dlp binary build for your OS and hardware from https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest

3. Into that same folder, download the appropriate Deno binary build for your OS and hardware from https://github.com/denoland/deno/releases/latest

4. Again into that folder, download the appropriate FFmpeg binary build for your OS and hardware from https://github.com/yt-dlp/FFmpeg-Builds/releases/latest

5. Unpack all three files you downloaded into that folder, into that same folder, using your favorite unpacking tool like WinRAR or 7zip.

6. You should mpw see yt-dlp.exe and deno.exe, among other stuff, residing inside that folder. Now just move the "ffmpeg.exe" and "ffprobe.exe" files found in its bin subfolder into the main folder so it's located alongside deno.exe and yt-dlp.exe.

That's it. (You can also do all this under Linux and MacOS.)

After the steps above, you should be able to execute yt-dlp.exe inside a command prompt window that's running in the same folder as those .exe files.

To download the whole WFTM channel, you would use the same red highlighted command visible in my screenshot (including the quotes where shown):

yt-dlp --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClkQdRWjBXg2b5tA5MEAXpw"

Any other channel can be downloaded that way, of course. Just replace the channel URL portion of the command.

To download one specific Youtube video, you would use the same command, but instead of giving a channel URL, you would give the regular youtube.com/watch?v= URL of the video.

You can also make yt-dlp automatically download a list of specific videos by putting each video's regular /watch?v= URL on its own line in a Notepad generated .txt file. Then run the command above, but instead of giving a channel or video URL, type -a mylist.txt (mylist.txt being the file name of your Notepad authored list). You can alternatively just paste several Youtube video's /watch?v= URLs in a row (separated by spaces) where you would normally paste the single video or channel URL.

If you only want to download the audio of a video (or only the audio of all videos in a channel), which is a much better option for aircheck collectors given the storage space requirements, simply replace the -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" portion of the command above with -f 251/140 --extract-audio

Hope this helps.

Incidentally, here is the full user manual for yt-dlp. https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/ Just beware: it is almost as thick as a Unix manual. yt-dlp is extremely versatile and can download streams and videos from thousands of sites on the internet (well, except for the big DRM encumbered ones like Netflix).

 

[yeoldeschool]

One addition. For some videos, where the video thumbnails show photographs of tape labels as in the case of everything in the WTFM channel, or where each video's description contains useful stuff like a track listing, adding these parameters to your commandline can be helpful: --write-thumbnail and --write-description

The first saves the highest resolution version available of each video's thumbnail alongside the video file, and the second saves the description in a plain ASCII formatted file with a .description extension. (You can later rename these in Windows Explorer to add .txt to the ends of the file names to make them openable in programs like Notepad.)

There is also a --write-comments parameter that lets you archive all of a video's comments as well, but it saves them in json format, and you will need a json parser to properly read it. It's still internally an ASCII file, however, so you can use Notepad to open comments files as well, such as for Ctrl-F searching.

 

[Gregg.]

The modern incarnation of WTFM is WKTU. I think somehow they are now on the Empire non-directional, despite a station at 103.3 in Trenton, N.J.

Actually the 103.3 is in Princeton, owned by Princeton University. It's a full Class B commercial station, even though not many commercials are heard on it.

I'm surprised WKTU doesn't have to be directional. WPRB went on the air in 1940, while WTFM went on the air in 1958 in Babylon LI. As WKTU, it moved to a tower in Manhattan, I believe the World Trade Center, less than 50 miles from Princeton. Maybe if WPRB were owned by a for-profit company, it would have objected to the FCC to have WKTU, one notch above WPRB, broadcast from a tower in Manhattan with no directional protection.

 

[Weiserguy]

Actually the 103.3 is in Princeton, owned by Princeton University. It's a full Class B commercial station, even though not many commercials are heard on it.

I'm surprised WKTU doesn't have to be directional. WPRB went on the air in 1940, while WTFM went on the air in 1958 in Babylon LI. As WKTU, it moved to a tower in Manhattan, I believe the World Trade Center, less than 50 miles from Princeton. Maybe if WPRB were owned by a for-profit company, it would have objected to the FCC to have WKTU, one notch above WPRB, broadcast from a tower in Manhattan with no directional protection.

Going from memory, but I think WKTU's owner, iHeart, cut a deal with WPRB some years ago that PRB would accept interference from KTU up to a certain distance, which allowed the move off Chrysler to WTC or ESB. I can't believe there wouldn't have been some remuneration for WPRB for accepting that deal, though I don't know/can't remember what it was. But for them the motivation (other than cash) might have been that beyond the Princeton/Plainsboro/Trenton/New Brunswick region, they were less concerned with other "distant" listeners.

 

[fybush]

Going from memory, but I think WKTU's owner, iHeart, cut a deal with WPRB some years ago that PRB would accept interference from KTU up to a certain distance, which allowed the move off Chrysler to WTC or ESB. I can't believe there wouldn't have been some remuneration for WPRB for accepting that deal, though I don't know/can't remember what it was. But for them the motivation (other than cash) might have been that beyond the Princeton/Plainsboro/Trenton/New Brunswick region, they were less concerned with other "distant" listeners.

It was actually a three-way arrangement that also included WNNJ-FM, which was also short spaced to Lake Success and to WPRB.

Everyone agreed to accept some mutual interference in exchange for being allowed to increase power, and 103.5 was able to go from Chrysler to WTC (and eventually to ESB after 9/11).

 

[Weiserguy]

It was actually a three-way arrangement that also included WNNJ-FM, which was also short spaced to Lake Success and to WPRB.

Everyone agreed to accept some mutual interference in exchange for being allowed to increase power, and 103.5 was able to go from Chrysler to WTC (and eventually to ESB after 9/11).

So power increase but no compensation? Okay... Your memory (or your file cabinet) is much better than mine. Thanks, Scott.

 

[fybush]

I need to go back and refresh my memory - I do think some compensation changed hands to get WPRB to buy in.

 

[Josh Owens]

I wish they had posted these to the internet archive so I could download them and listen offline.

Try this, I use it frequently.

YouTube to MP3 Converter & Downloader - OnlyMP3

Convert YouTube videos to MP3 instantly with our ad-free YouTube Converter. No signup needed. Enjoy high quality audio downloads fast, easy, and free.

en.onlymp3.io

 

[yeoldeschool]

Try this, I use it frequently.

YouTube to MP3 Converter & Downloader - OnlyMP3

Convert YouTube videos to MP3 instantly with our ad-free YouTube Converter. No signup needed. Enjoy high quality audio downloads fast, easy, and free.

en.onlymp3.io

Interesting link. It's much simpler than yt-dlp. although you do lose some quality with it, considering it insists on converting all Youtube AAC/Opus audio tracks to 128 kbit/s MP3.

There were once several Youtube audio ripping sites, but Google went after most of them. Are you aware of any that still work and provide every video's AAC/Opus audio track untranscoded? The only surviving option I'm aware of for that is Invidious, but I rarely recommend it these days as its reliability is hit and miss. (It allows downloading of videos, or of just their audio, but its main purpose is allowing ad-free Youtube viewing, which Google absolutely hates. So its instances tend to become temporarily unavailable whenever Youtube experiments with a new blocking technique against it ... and until the creators find a new workaround.)

The instance at invidious.nerdvpn.de (e.g. https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/channel/UClkQdRWjBXg2b5tA5MEAXpw) is currently working, however, if you would like to try it. Note the "Download as:" drop-down beneath the playback window while watching videos. ("audio/mp4" gives you access to the AAC-LC tracks at high and low bit rates, and "audio/webm" gives you access to the Opus tracks also at high and low bit rates.)

 

[RMarino]

Thanks for all the tips. I’ve had two YT downloaders in the past, but they both quit working. I’ll try those suggestions.

 

[alok]

Good Stuff, Thanks

I remember them (again, growing up in Northern NJ in the 60's) they did not have a great signal at the time, I guess that was when they transmitted from Lake Success.
I was not a fan of them at the time (Top 40/RnR ) was my thing then. But today as was said above . . . it sounds pretty good.
Again, Thank You for the info on the airchecks.

 

[K6JHU]

Anecdotally, WTFM was put on the air by Friendly Frost chain of appliance stores as a way to sell stereos. They were one of the first (if not the first) to be full time FM Stereo. In addition to full time stereo, they were following a 'foreign accent' theme so all the announcers had to have a European accent. I did hear them slip every once in a while though I think I will try and catch up on the airchecks.

 

[Miss Tuned]

You can download an entire Youtube channel automatically with the program yt-dlp. Here's a demo screenshot of me initiating a full channel download of the WTFM channel. I typed the command in red, and the rest began happening automatically without further intervention.

I used this recently when I had a long internet outage at home - took my Linux laptop to work, used yt-dlp to download videos from YouTube to watch that night. Anything to avoid TV!

It worked up to a point, but I got rate limited after I'd downloaded a couple of videos, and would have to wait 20-30 minutes to be able to download any more. I wonder how downloading an entire channel would work with that type of restriction in place.

 

[yeoldeschool]

I used this recently when I had a long internet outage at home - took my Linux laptop to work, used yt-dlp to download videos from YouTube to watch that night. Anything to avoid TV!

It worked up to a point, but I got rate limited after I'd downloaded a couple of videos, and would have to wait 20-30 minutes to be able to download any more. I wonder how downloading an entire channel would work with that type of restriction in place.

Youtube is constantly battling various mass scrapers, like for AI training. Some belong to massive corporations, others to individuals. But they typically operate from behind IP netblocks belonging to generic data centers, VPN providers, and private entities as assigned at the ARIN/RIPE/etc. level. So Youtube is known to employ much more cranky automation detection tripwires against those kinds of IP addresses than against run-of-the-mill, well-known residential and cellular IP addresses. Depending upon who your employer is and how Youtube views their IP address space, that may be one possible reason for your experience. Another cause might have been if you were downloading too fast -- an unthrottled multi-gigabit corporate or institutional connection would easily qualify.

There is a thread on Reddit describing ways to mitigate these issues with things like sleep parameters. Another important point is to always make sure you're running the very latest version of yt-dlp (nightly builds are often best), as countermeasures to Youtube's tightness are constantly being found and implemented. Preventing yt-dlp from taking full advantage of your maximum connection speed, with the --limit-rate switch, can be another workaround. The thread also shows how to make yt-dlp log into Youtube with your Google account (there is a command line switch for having it read the cookies from your browser and send them to Youtube with its own requests) -- good for overcoming some kinds of download limits and things like age verification. (On this particular item, however, my advice is to only let yt-dlp log into throw-away Google accounts if doing mass downloads. Not for any lack of trust in yt-dlp, but because there are rumors Google has banned accounts before that slurped too greedily from their servers with yt-dlp, and you wouldn't want to endanger an important account.)

P.S. I'm downloading the whole WTFM channel right now (Opus audio tracks only), simply to see how far it will get. It's up to 103 videos out of 200. Not logged in or using any sleep parameters, either, and am on a residential cable ISP IP. My only precaution is a 1.5 MiB/s rate limit.