In order to help organize the series I put 50 shows per disc in
chronological order. This ends up taking up about 500MB of space on a
650MB disc. This wiggle room left on the disc allows me room to make
multisession discs, which allows for corrections, additions, 'deletions',
and replacements of poorer-quality shows with better ones. Because it
takes about 13MB per subsequent session, the disc can be modified about
10x before it runs out of room. At that point I re-master to a new disc
and start the process again. [When the disc is remastered the sessions
are compressed and the 'overwritten' files are excluded, so you're back
to 500MB again.]
reruns and dupes
Many shows were re-rerun over the course of the series. My collection
does not attempt all broadcasts of a given show, only the best one.
Note also that some titles were used
more than once, which can complicate dating.
EGM v. HB rebroadcasts
I collect the modern Himan Brown rebroadcasts as well as the EG Marshall
originals. HB shows will use the original EG show dates.
Purists prefer the EG, but the HB shows are almost always much better
quality. I am currently moving the HB shows off to their own discs.
understanding Show length
~42 minutes: commercials and news edited out, about 8MB @ 32k
~60 minutes: news and commercials intact, about 11.5MB @ 32k.
Show quality
Ironically, the RMT shows available to the collector are not as good as
much older shows from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. This is because the RMT has
never been released on any kind of LP, CD, or cassette format. The great
majority of shows we have were taped by a fan off the radio, usually on
reel or cassette. Those tapes by now are 20-25 years old and are steadily
deteriorating. If I had to guess, I'd say that 55% are acceptable,
30% good or very good and 15% poor or very bad. On the very bad
ones, the problem is generally muffling (lack of higher frequencies)
which makes it hard to hear clearly. A handful are in such bad shape
they are unlistenable; no other versions of those shows exists so far.
In some rare cases I will included more than one copy of the same show
if the two encodes offer something and neither is obviously better (one
is muffled but complete; another is incomplete but clear).
I have word that some shows were taped from a line feed, although
they may or may not be circulating.
The upside is that new encodes are showing up steadily (from my own
projects and from many other generous folks), with about 2-3 new encodes
appearing every month. As they roll in I replace the poorer-quality
shows on my discs.
The trick is to get one's paws on as many encodes as possible, dedupe and keep
only the best encodes.
Preprocessing
I run my secondhand files (encoded by others) through a registered version
of MP3trim, which cleans up illegal frames, removes extraneous blank
frames, and normalizes to 0db without decoding and re-encoding. Sometimes
a show benefits from processing in a .wav editor; in cases where I have
done that the filename carries the "r" flag.
Shows that carry "vbr" were likely my original encodes.
dating
I base my dates and titles on the data that was once on Bob Cook's site.
The date given is the original air date of the show.
codes
Some of the shows have initials or codes after the date. Here is what they mean:
rj, rjd, etc: re-encode of a JazzDrummer rip.
raa, rad, etc: re-encode of an AudioAddict rip
WIP: original encodes based on the WIP ripping project
jt: original encodes based on the jt ripping project
kb, kb2: original encodes based on the kb ripping projects
hb: Himan Brown rebroadcast
eg: original E.G. Marshall broadcast (if no hb or eg is present, the show is EG-narrated except for later shows after Tammy Grimes took over)
inc: incomplete. Missing start or end.
poor, very bad: very bad audio. Currently all known sources of the show are in poor condition.
xtalk: crosstalk
-intro: missing (ie, minus) the intro. also -outro, etc.
