[Roger -Dot- Lee(Admin)]

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.

Originally Posted by OverHillAndDale

4 hours - Gags is a four hour marathon of which a very low percentage of folks listen to on it's original broadcast night.

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'.

Originally Posted by OverHillAndDale

Those that come into shout about then usually roll their virual eyes. Now out of that 4 hours, approximatley only 3 hours of it are music. The rest are promotions for New Jersey and other places and events that AM listeners have little to no interest in (or they've heard them so many times....). Do we really want promos and commercials on our airwaves?

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.

Originally Posted by OverHillAndDale

The show just is not working as well anymore, for me. What that show was prior to the RIAA uproad has not seemed to return.

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.

Originally Posted by OverHillAndDale

Now, I have to admit I'm new to Tom's shows. I have only been listening to him about 1.5 years - not a very long time. Most of the time I can't understand the dialogue or monologue. I hardly ever know what's playing unless I recognize it. As Lamour said before, that takes a lot of the interest and enjoyment out of the program.

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.

Originally Posted by OverHillAndDale

What I'd like to see from Tom is a version of his show that he does just for us. Not a rebroadcast of their Saturday night show, but a separate, individually programmed show just for AM listeners.

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.