Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

I hadn't thanks. I see about the alliterations (Themeing Thursday, Fusion Friday).

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Isn't all meant to be about having a bit of FUN?????????

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Yes - 1 vote

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Hey Cozy! Long time no hear or read. Glad to hear you're doing well. I miss your show, I guess I never thought of posting in the Interzone forum thread, but I have questioned what happened to the Interzone a couple times in chat.

I'm with Dale & VAX on the psychedelic show, I've always liked that kind of music and consider it to be one of the main precursors to prog and I sometimes listen to the TWOS stream when I need a psychedelic fix, so it would definitely be cool to have a psychedelic show on the Moon in my book. Maybe sometime during the work day (e.g. a spot during 9-5 EST).

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I know I'm coming into the fray late here. But there are some points that I feel MUST be addressed.

I've known Tom Gagliardi for many years now. I've been running his show since shortly after Aural Moon first introduced it lo these many years ago.
He's a close, personal friend. Having said that, I'd like to toss in a disclaimer that I'm not taking any of this personally. Just bringing to light some things that may not be evident to Joe Random Listener.

This isn't necessarily true. We keep a record of listeners on an hourly basis. Granted, we don't get as many listeners as prime time, but there's more than could even be charitably considered a 'very low percentage'.

You need to adjust your calculations a bit. At most, there are three to five PSAs per hour. That's at most five minutes of every sixty minute hour. That's less than 10%, much less 25%.

We really have no choice in this matter. We pull Tom's show straight off their streaming server and put it right on the air. I could sit and try to block out the PSAs (that Tom is legally required to run), but the alternate would be dead air. Now I'm not sure about anyone else, but I'd find dead air more tedious than PSAs about the latest New Jersey law or historical information about the Pine Barrens.

Besides, there's a technical limitation to consider.

There's usually a seven to ten second delay from the moment Tom says something until it gets to us. It makes timing VERY interesting. That's the main reason there's always a glitch of WBZC foo at the end of his show. I have nothing to judge by save the meters that are bouncing on the station. I can get fairly close, but hitting the cut-off button right as his outro finishes is almost impossible.

Now imagine trying to hit that same button in the middle of a show for sixty seconds of dead air.

Not my idea of an enjoyable Saturday evening, I assure you.

Tom's show hasn't changed appreciably over the break. The format is identical. The PSAs, and the credits have, but the content has largely been the same over the years.

Unfortunately, we can only put out the quality we get. We get a 32k stream from WBZC. That's not likely to improve, since it's a college radio station, and they don't have the budget of a WNBC or KSFO (for our west coast listeners), though if you'd like to offer them a fatter pipe and a heftier server on your dime, I'm sure they wouldn't complain in the least. Barring that, my only suggestion to that is to do what I've been doing since I started listening to Tom many years ago: adjust your client to tone down the bass and treble, and boost the mid range. iTunes has a nice equalizer embedded that works wonders.

This isn't going to happen now or ever. Tom is NOT a professional DJ, in spite of how good his radio presence is. He has a Day Job, just like the rest of us, and he doesn't have the time or energy to put together the regular weekly show and THEN, on top of that, a show for us. It's just not practical, and it'd be horribly unfair to ask it of him.

He provides us a service by bringing a much wider variety of unknown and underplayed artists, free of charge. He does it for no other reason than the love of the music, much the same as Vax, Jim, myself, and Avian. To ask for our own special show would NOT fly.

If we were downloading a MP3 from WBZC, and had a couple of hours to go hack at it with an editor, it might (for extremely small values of 'might') be possible to go through and edit out the PSAs. But as Vax and I both have those unfortunate things known as 'real lives' and 'day jobs', we don't have the time to download 500 MB of show, slice out bits and pieces, re-upload, and get it set up in time for the replay. Possible ain't practical.

Hope this clears things up a bit. I'm no fan of the PSAs either (believe me, I've heard them all and more). But I'd hate even more to have to edit them out, only to replace them with dead air, and I'd hate even worse to lose The Gagliarchives.

Roger -Dot- Lee, makin' up for lost time.

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

OK. Just interjecting a bit on the technical.

We get a 32Kbps stereo stream. That is not high quality by ANY stretch of the imagination. This 32Kbps can, at max, sample at 22KHz (realistically, that's pretty poor quantization at that rate too). Being that this is a stereo feed, that sampling is safely half that for each channel or 11KHz. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem says that the maximum frequency that can be produced is 1/2 the sample rate. So, this puts the top end around 6KHz. Not great quality? Consider that the high C (key 88 on the piano) is ~4200Hz (middle C is 262Hz, so you can figure it exactly for 4 octaves higher) the frequency spectum we get isn't very good. I'll spare you the Fourier analysis of the distortion that this presents.

That said, I live close enough that I can get Gags off of the FM airwaves. The FCC's FM frequency allocations at ±100KHz permit about 15KHz as the maximum upper frequency (again, I'll spare you the math of the Fourier integral). This is CONSIDERABLY better than we get from the Real stream. If Gags will continue, it was my plan to erect a highly selective, high gain antenna and get the show off of the FM airwaves and encode it in a higher quality MP3 stream to send to the AM server. This would also get rid of the FM preemphasis which now gives Tom's show its bassy boomy sound.

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

you'd do that during all your copious free-time, Vax?

/hug

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I thought that's what they WERE -- suggestions. I wasn't aware that theming thursday was mandatory.


I've found, with very limited exceptions, that this is indeed the case. When dealing with a group this large, issues can arise. My policy, however, is to generally let things take their own course.

Unless, of course, they denigrate even further, in which case I'm definitely not hesitant to invoke the titanium-plated drill-bit of common courtesy (as I believe any of the regulars (and even some of the not-so-regulars) can likely attest to).

True, it may be limiting. However, without following a theme of one form or another, the shows can (and likely will) turn into little more than a three hour request block. Not something I'm interested in supporting.

Roger -Dot- Lee

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

Free time? Nah, I just sacrifice sleep. Besides, sleep is highly overrated.

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

Always welcome from this corner of God's Country.

Though other members might disagree.

Anyway, on to the comments and questions:

No, it's really not. I don't believe I've ever heard Gags on the 56k stream, so I can't say for certain how much of an impact this could have on sound quality. I'm sure it wouldn't be all that much as the limiting factor is still the 32k we get from WBZC.

I agree on the statement that it's poor quantization. I'm wondering, however, why the sampling rate is so low, especially considering that the audio is compressed before it even heads this way (I believe).

Side question: does Real Player use compression? If it can, but we're currently not, we may want to consider it. It may be a bit of extra work, but I think the benefits would outweigh the additional overhead.


Let's talk off line.


How far out are you? And will inclement weather perhaps cause signal degradation as well as 'black holes'?

Again, let's take it off line.

Dr. Dot, doin' some postdoc work here.

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I don't know all of the details of Real's codecs; however, I would say it's safe to assume that the quality calculation wouldn't improve much with incorporation.



Well, as the crow flies, about 22 miles. As the horseflies, about 35 miles as we have to go around Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station. It's a 40-45 minute drive for me from home to Tom's studio. Be aware this is south Jersey and those are NOT highway miles.

As for black holes, I haven't seen any.

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

Personally I think that the compression of Gags makes the show unlistenable on the web, and dropping it would be fine with me.

I do like Mcfee's Progshores which I haven't heard in a long while.

On another note, I like the concept of a Digressive Prog Show, but I'm not sure if it would work since there would be major battles as to what is and isn't prog again. BÖC Deep Purple, etc. I'm sure someone out there feels that The Carpenters is viable.... but I digress.

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

Great! Today on his show Tom said something that made me curious about something. However, since nobody who seems to know anything about him or his show was around listening to it, I couldn't get an answer to my question.

He said something that made it sound like his father was famous or important in the music industry or something, and it made me wonder...who is Tom? Who is his father?

I've never heard his name anywhere except on the moon, so I don't have any idea who he is, but people seem to talk about him here like he's the reason prog exists. I feel like I'm missing some important piece of information.

[note: as I reread this, I feel that it would be easy to misread the tone of this message. I'm not being antagonistic. I'm just asking a question that I don't have the answer to.]


thanks,
lamour

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

Lamour, please visit his website, it has a section devoted to his father.

I don't think you're missing anything. I don't have that impression.

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He's only 35, so that's not it. My impression of the history here is that he was a person that embraced prog when many of us (including me) had stopped listening to prog. He carried the torch and as such has established himself as a tour de force in this area. A subject matter expert if you will.

If you follow some of the discussions on progarchives, there were some interesting posts of people referring to the acts of the early 70s that pioneered prog as dinosaur bands, implying the notion of extinction. The renaissance (pun intended) of prog in recent years is very interesting to me, including a lot of excellent music that has surfaced in the past few, and a reason I embrace AM.

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I Googled for about 15-20 mintues before I gave up. He has a website? I couldn't find anything with any information on it at all. Perhaps I just didn't use the right terms.

OK, I found a gagliarchives site that links to his father's website. He's a jazz guitarist in Philly and Tom's icon-ness is completely unrelated?


well...just looking at this thread (and the parent thread):

while I overstated it before for emphasis, this is still pretty high praise for someone I know nothing about. I was just curious who he is. I'm not saying that the praise is undeserved, just that I have no information to go on, that's all.

(because it's all about me) ;-)


ignorantly,
lamour

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

lamour,

I sent you my email so we can take a discussion offline. In the meantime -

http://www.gagliarchives.com/

Rick

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

OK...I have to ask:

What does this mean?

"The new Home Edition of the Gagliarchives coming soon on Aural Moon "

What does Home Edition mean?

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

O.K., Im a grizzeled old Progger.
1) I need the Rickter Scale. The man has seen live, more bands then the moon could play in a Day. Im constantly Introduced to Whole CD's of New Artists with a chance to get the whole thing played. He knows more about the Modern Artists than Any Moonie Alive except the Boss. He also appreciates the Edges of prog. ( like T.Dolby or TF Fears) R&R is a must
2) Gags is a must, insitefull and Interviews with the Best Artists. He held the torch when most let it slip out of their Hands.
3) I like Cozy and Interzone, However Im really into the Fusion action not the pure jazz. His expertise of all "that Jazzy Crap" Is so good but I find that his Straight Jazz artists are not in the Moons Vein.
4) Sean has the world covered but sometimes its just to obsure, I have said before that just because its Prog doesnt make it automatically good. Many poor artists IMHO

5) This station NEEDS a New release Show! Period
6) Now to make Jim and Management Cringe, I would still Like a Classics show for an Hour or Two from recordings of the giants of '66 to 86' :bang!:

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

And that's why there's more than one show on the Moon. I love Cozy's show. It's up to Jim if it fits his vision for the station, but it's certainly music to my ears. ;-)

(you didn't mention Moses' show, but my comments are the same for that)


How on earth can you ever get too obscure for prog? Just because it's obscure doesn't mean it's bad. A lot of what I like to listen to sounds like noise to other people.* That's kinda why I'm here. Cutting a show from the Moon because it doesn't only play bands that sound like everyone else seems like a bad idea to me. I'd rather hear something that sounds like nothing I've ever heard before on the off chance that it's something I'll love than to hear more music by bands rehashing the same stuff over and over. I would think the whole point of shows is to introduce us to new things we probably wouldn't find otherwise.

* one time I had 3-4 browser tabs open on youtube videos and the browser crashed. when I started it back up it started playing all of them at the same time. I didn't realize what was happening at first, so I was trying to figure out what song was playing because it was so awesome I wanted to go buy it. ;-)

(it was 2 Naikaku songs, a Stanley Clarke song, and something else, I think. In case you care.)


wow, they win one silly football game and now the Giants get a radio show on the Moon? How crazy is that? ;-)


Whatever happens happens. As long as the music stays fresh, I'm happy.


imho,
lamour

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I have no problem with the sharc's comments. One thing I try to do is play artists that you otherwise would not have a chance to hear. Sometimes they are only available on vinyl, and can be pretty hard to find. So someone might have been curious about a band (or had no idea they existed) and then find out they enjoy it. And of course another band that is long forgotten may have been so for a reason. I am sure some of the tracks I have played are poor, and I'm actually hoping that the move to 90 minutes will reduce the number of times I feel I have to "add something" to get up to a full two hour show.

It's a funny thing, but I actually got involved with Musique ProgresSon when my eventual business partner found out about my Aural Moon show (I was doing Canadian shows at the time) and tuned in, then contacted me. The result after a few years is that many of these artists are now available on CD. So Aural Moon has some indirect responsibility for the ProgQuebec label.

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I'm just ringing in to say I have no problems with Sharc's comments either. Discussion of the shows is (almost) always a good thing, and I think Sean, Rick, and myself (not trying to speak for everyone) are always open to comments.

Quickly two comments...

Regarding Sean's show and "obscurities", it's kind of the nature of the game when doing shows about different countries. If nothing else, the EXPOSURE into another country's progressive rock and related output that one would otherwise likely never hear should be a fascinating experience even if your ultimate feeling is that most of the music that day did little for you.

Regarding Interzone, I try to make the content varied enough so that if you don't like what's on one week, there's a good chance I'll play something you'll like the week after, as I currently feature about 7 or 8 different show themes.


- Cozy

Re: Aural Moon Shows
 

Thanks everyone for all the comments. I am closing each of the individual show threads for comments. I guess that means they're closed for voting as well.

I apologize for the conflict that I unwittingly generated. Really, all I was trying to do was calibrate my feelings about the various shows. I was not planning any drastic changes, like unilaterally eliminating any shows. Anyway, I have enough verbal feedback, and there will be some modest changes in existing shows but nothing is going away. I will be working on some ideas for additional themes/shows/new music playtime. Any changes will be announced.

I also unwittingly, but happily, helped to bring Cozy and Sean back into current rotation, so to speak, so there should be some good new shows coming up. Stay tuned, you just might learn something - I usually do.

Thanks for the candid feedback. The listeners are the only reason for Aural Moon to exist. Without you, I'd just take my insanely large, as a result of obsessive/compulsive disorder, music collection and go home. R)

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Now without letting me get at least a copy you don't...

I've got 3.8 TB of disk space here at home and my pr0n collection is NOT that big.

Roger -Dot- Lee 'nuff said.