HFU HF Underground
General Category => Pirate Radio History => Topic started by: ThaDood on August 08, 2020, 1926 UTC
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Is this something to commemorate, really? Radio Survivor did, http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2020/08/04/podcast-257-marking-a-quarter-century-of-mp3/ Now, why did I post this here? I didn't see the NEW TOPIC icon appear in the HUH category. Anyway, pirate stations have certainly taken advantage of the convenience of using .MP3 audio since about 1997. Which leads me to ask this, what pirate station was the first to try using .MP3 audio, and when? One way that you've noticed was when pirate relays stopped being 45min and 30min in lengths, or 1/2 the time of one cassette tape side. I still remember the September 1990 Radio Wolf Int. mentioning that the brief dead-air pause was them flipping over the tape. Ahhhhhhhh, memories....
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I would guess the first station to use mp3 on a broadcast did it in the 1990s, it would have taken a computer connected to a transmitter then. I would think the big switch to digital audio would have happened when the when recordable CDs, and then portable mp3 players came out, allowing stations to broadcast remotely.
Here I would get mp3s online, then record them to tape, having nothing else but the one computer to play them at the time, with not enough space to save a whole collection of files.
Mp3 audio quality is not necessarily poor, I'm sure that's up for debate in audiophile circles, and analog sources can be recorded at all different qualities on tape. Its just that mp3 didn't set out to be a poor quality format. There were a few poor encoders early on though, and a bigger problem was that to save space on storage media, people stuck with encoding at lower bitrates, perhaps not noticing the quality because of being dazzled by the new tech.
Here in the future, if you record using high bitrates like 320k and with a better codec like Lame, subjective quality can be good.
Now we could be storing uncompressed files, but I'm glad for mp3 early on, it gave us audio we might not otherwise have. I'll continue to use it.
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Just a quicky.
Considering shortwave in full blown 300 to 3k AM; and more so in SSB; the MP3s are just "Fine as Frog's Fur".
Ever see fur on a frog?
Pretty damned fine, ain't it?
;-))
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I've got a box of an entire decade of 60 minute cassettes, with "time to flip the tape folks" at the end. All of them were one off shows, many under different names. I never knew a pirate with just one station.
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I've got a box of an entire decade of 60 minute cassettes, with "time to flip the tape folks" at the end. All of them were one off shows, many under different names. I never knew a pirate with just one station.
My guess is the number of pirate operators is roughly equal to the square root of the number of pirate stations.
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Audio quality took a notable dive when commercial recording studios decided "louder is better" with dynamic compression. Slam recordings into an aggressive brickwall limiter. Now take that heavily cooked source, then cook it again with a broadcast compressor and/or limiter. o.0
That said, there are mathematical approaches to "declipping" audio. Often I use Stereo Tool when listening to digital audio via headphones or earphones; particularly heavily cooked online broadcast streams.
https://www.thimeo.com/documentation/declipper.html
There is a more affordable personal use license available via the Perfect Declipper site if not interested in any other paid ST features.
http://register.perfectdeclipper.com/
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My guess is the number of pirate operators is roughly equal to the square root of the number of pirate stations.
Therefore, I was once 1.414213562373 of a person but since the US Supreme Court ruled years ago that corporations are people, maybe the math all works out.
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As CEO of FANCO Broadcasting, I ceased to exist as a person around 2004.I don't miss having to bathe one bit.