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

[Miss Tuned]

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.

I work at a major university, with a big pipe! The wi-fi normally hits about 600Mbps, and the IP block is classed as academic/research. Perhaps they potentially see it as a researcher bulk downloading videos to feed into experimental models or something, rather than someone wanting to download lots of Jet Lag The Game.

I find the same at home, my internet at home has a 2Gbps download and upload speed, and when I've used yt-dlp at home I always get rate limited. I didn't know you could limit the connection speed, so I might give that a go next time I need to use it (I've got a flight coming up, so I often use it for that.)

 

[Josh Owens]

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.)

Only site I've found that still works, is the one I posted above. Most of those kind of sites are vollitle at best. Yeah, I've noticed some strange file sizes when downloading vids from there, unable to check the bitrate, due to something between the status bar Windows 10 and NVDA breaking, some years ago, so I get what I get LOL.

 

[Josh Owens]

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.

)

 

[alok]

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.

Did not know that about Friendly Frost & WTFM, I remember that chain well, advertising on 1950's, 60's NYC radio.

 

[Weiserguy]

Is downloading 200 tapes of WTFM really necessary? After all, after a few dozen, you're likely to start getting the same music repeating, just in a different order. The announcers and contemporaneous ad spots have largely been edited away (or the creator was adept at using her recorder's pause switch), so have the newscasts (which would put some historical context into when the tapes were made). So again, how many copies of the same music do you really need to copy?

 

[Weiserguy]

Did not know that about Friendly Frost & WTFM, I remember that chain well, advertising on 1950's, 60's NYC radio.

Originally the station was WGLI-FM, licensed to a community in western Suffolk County. (Babylon comes to mind.) Then when they filed for, and got approval to change their city-of-license to Lake Success and relocate, they wanted to separate themselves from WGLI-AM, so they changed calls to WTFM and physically moved the operation to Fresh Meadows, which is only a few miles west of Lake Success but also allowed for a high enough tower to cover Queens, Nassau and parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx well. Keep in mind that when this all went down, Suffolk was much more scarcely populated, and much of it was still working farmland. And the cows and potatoes don't fill out diaries or answer Pulse or Hooper survey calls.

 

[Chad-Stevens]

Hilda apparently loved Charlie Duval. So many of the airchecks are of his ooh la la très français sounds.
So did Monsieur Duval work anywhere else in radio? And was he French, French Canadian, or just an American guy putting on an accent? There's nothing written about him except that he made an appearance on To Tell The Truth in 1963, for which he has an IMDB page.

 

[Huff]

September 1967, Passaic Herald-News:

 

[davideduardo]

Did not know that about Friendly Frost & WTFM, I remember that chain well, advertising on 1950's, 60's NYC radio.

In 1978, I "bought" WTFM as part of a three market expansion of the radio division of Pueblo International which I headed. I got the financing through Chase and MannyHanny and even did the due diligence at both the World Trade antenna and the studios out on Long Island.

The deal collapsed when Pueblo, who had sold the Hills Supermarket chain to Pantry Pride, suddenly became liable for all the dead Pantry Pride leases.

The studios, I found, were rather ancient looking. Well kept up, but not a "modern" radio station. In any case, we would have moved into Manhattan and changed format.

 

[davideduardo]

Is downloading 200 tapes of WTFM really necessary? After all, after a few dozen, you're likely to start getting the same music repeating, just in a different order.

Do the math. There would generally be about 120 to 160 one-hour tapes in a "random access" music library for a syndicated Beautiful Music format. At about 18 to 20 cuts per reel, that means about 2,400 songs to well over 300 of 'em.

Locally programmed formats generally tended to have larger libraries than syndicated formats, at least well into the 70's.

Yes, we repeated the "big songs" on multiple reels, and played our custom music more than the commercial album cuts. But that still means that you would need well over 150 hours of actual air´play to get every single cut.

And, since stations, whether syndicated or locally programmed, added and removed cuts regularly (I changed at least 12 reels a month in my service) that means that, over time, the number of actual cuts is even greater.

 

[yeoldeschool]

Then add that background-downloading channels of this size happens very quickly on modern fiber connections, and that with today's cheap, bottomless storage, 14.1 GB being allocated to some random thing on yet another drive is basically nothing. (Well, that's what all 200 Opus files came to, in the end. No problems with Youtube to speak of.)