I'm going to suggest a small, 100 watt station that's owned by my local high school district on the San Francisco peninsula. It's KCEA, licensed to Menlo Park/Atherton, and it plays mostly music from the 30's and 40's, with a sprinkling of cuts extending into the late 20's and forward into the 50's, but very selectively. Miller, Dorsey, Goodman, Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Ella, and some lesser known and forgotten bands. If this is the music style you want to hear, it's here. www.kcea.org
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Comprehensive List Of Stations Still Airing the Soft AC/Easy Listening Format?
- Thread starter cc333
- Start date
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
How do you manage to completely miss my points, Chimp?
I try to give good advice to build up your personal MP3 libraries so that when these stations eventually give up on Easy Listening, you will be prepared.
You somehow focus on my mentioning that my personal collection includes Big Band tracks, as if I somehow didn't know that no one plays those anymore? THAT WAS MY POINT. GET YOUR MP3 LIBRARY TOGETHER BEFORE THE MUSIC YOU LOVE IS NO LONGER ON THE RADIO.
Sheesh.
Can I contribute one? This may possibly be the most exotic Easy Listening station you will ever encounter: North Korean Central Television's official state broadcast service, KCNA! During the 30 minutes preceeding each day's broadcast, North Koreans are treated to the finest in communist elevator music the unfree world has to offer.
The fun starts at 8:30:00 in the on-screen clock. Broadcast engineer Peter Fairlie has been pulling KCNA off a foreign satellite visible from the east coast lately, and this is one of his latest uploads, highlighting the Kim regime's government-sanctioned musical tastes.
Inspired by the attached meme, I'm going to take the liberty of coining the format Uneasy Listening.
The fun starts at 8:30:00 in the on-screen clock. Broadcast engineer Peter Fairlie has been pulling KCNA off a foreign satellite visible from the east coast lately, and this is one of his latest uploads, highlighting the Kim regime's government-sanctioned musical tastes.
Inspired by the attached meme, I'm going to take the liberty of coining the format Uneasy Listening.
Attachments
OMG! I can visualize two million party functionaries gathering for calisthenics each morning, with that as their soundtrack!
I love it! High School students spinning Big Band music. I wonder how this was chosen as their format?
I don't know how any of that works and I don't have the money to spend.
You seemed to be suggesting those tracks were still played on stations described as "standards".
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Then you are doomed. Sorry, I have no other way to express a situation where someone dismisses a suggestion out of hand without even making an effort to see if it is possible.
Again, you seize on the wrong point. If my MP3 library goes back far enough to include the Big Band era, it stands to reason that the MOR standards would be there as well.
So I can somehow do this for free or a very low price?
I have a list of many of the songs which I could post here.
Another problem: If I tried to get the entire playlist of Serenade Radio, I don't know how many devices it would take to hold it all, and that's if I could get it all. And if I did it would cost as much as a car. Some things are necessities and I have to spend money on them.
The library you go to might have CDs you could check out for free.
That might work except there's a need to reproduce what I hear to have it permanently.
The selection is probably more limited than ... wait, what record stores?
Do you have a computer, you could transfer the CDs onto it.
Interesting.
I don't know how to do tech stuff. Also, I've had computers go bad and don't want to store anything there permanently.
Indeed!
How about a tape recorder and some tapes? Some decent ones can still be had for fairly cheap, and if your goal is to have a permanent record of your song collection, you're probably not going to find a better 20th century solution (plus you can play them in your car, if it's old enough to still have a player and that player works).
Standalone audio CD recorders exist too, but last I knew, they were less common and much more expensive. They're also somewhat harder to use. A computer + CD-R/RW drive would be better, but to get the drive, you'd have to get an older one (fortunately, with some careful searching, something adequate can be found in working condition for very cheap). If it goes bad, you'll still have the CDs, which should be playable in regular audio CD players.
You could even use a VCR to record audio onto a VHS tape, although those are starting to get hard to find (believe it or not, I think some cassette tapes are still in production, but not so VHS, as far as I know).
c
I do and I hadn't thought of that. I actually have cassettes I bought cheap of this style of music "just in case" but at home good music is still easy to find online.
I have a car with one of those, but I'm not good with tech stuff.
I have VCRs but they've pretty much all gotten a VHS cassette stuck in them.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
The first suggestion I will make is based on my knowing from your posts here that you are a regular public library user. Check with your library and see if they offer access to a free downloading site such as Freegal. The Los Angeles Public Library does that (they even provide a link to it from their own home page), and I use my library card number to log in there. Of course, being apparently subsidized by the libraries they partner with, they put a limit on the number of downloads per 24 hours, but you can still amass a decent collection over time.
There are also numerous free sites specializing in MP3 downloads. You can find those via a Google search.
No, please don't add to the clutter. If after looking at those sources you have trouble finding songs you really want, contact me via PM and I will see if I can help further.
@vchimpanzee - If money is an obstacle for you, Youtube has many of the songs stations like Serenade Radio plays. I explained a method of finding the highest quality copies of songs on Youtube in this thread last month. What I didn't explain there is that it is very easy to go one step beyond and download a personal copy of the audio from any Youtube video. There are tools all over the internet for accomplishing this and they aren't difficult to use. In any event, I sampled Serenade Radio while reading your posts and heard them playing a song called "You Only Live Twice" by "Ronnie Aldrich and His Orchestra." So I used the method described in that thread, and presto, Google lead me straight to a high quality copy of it on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQkkDQTTS2o
Another budget method of collecting music is simply "taping it off the radio," as everyone used to do back in the day. Only in this case, you would be taping it off the internet. You can use free and open source software like ffmpeg to save any internet stream directly to disk in real time, as an .mp3 or .m4a file, with zero quality loss. It's just like pressing record on a cassette deck in the olden days. Only in this case it records audio like a Nakamichi Dragon deck with metal tape in it.
Another budget method of collecting music is simply "taping it off the radio," as everyone used to do back in the day. Only in this case, you would be taping it off the internet. You can use free and open source software like ffmpeg to save any internet stream directly to disk in real time, as an .mp3 or .m4a file, with zero quality loss. It's just like pressing record on a cassette deck in the olden days. Only in this case it records audio like a Nakamichi Dragon deck with metal tape in it.
It's a tiny station, and once upon a time it was attached to the Menlo-Atherton high school in the Sequoia Unified High School District, offering students a chance to get a taste of operating a radio station as a potential career choice. That was quite a few years ago. Since then, students largely have lost interest in working in radio, for all the reasons that have been explored and discussed on RD.
The school district considered selling the station or turning in the license, but instead contracted with a professor from College of San Mateo (a local community college) named Michael Jacobs. Mike also had professional radio experience. He sold the school board on big band music as a market hole that could be programmed inexpensively, running unattended off a computer server, minimal maintenance, just the occasional specialty show to give the station a little bit of life. Sadly, Mike got ill and died about a decade ago, and his replacement has continued running the station (since relocated to the district offices) as a mostly "lights out" operation, using the same automation and music library that Mike set up. (I imagine the equipment has to get updated occasionally.)
That's the saga, as best I know it.
That seems like a waste of a signal.
I presume you were responding to me. Care to suggest a better use for a 100 watt signal at 89.1? It's not my personal taste in music, but if enough people are willing to kick in enough money to keep the station breaking even, then it serves a purpose, right?