My Trading Philosophy
I generally subscribe to the current philosophy of free trade – that is the unrestricted sharing of material along with a commitment to never sell old-time radio. However, I maintain certain restrictions on free sharing. I will cover these later
I have traded OTR for the last 30 years. I will accept trades in any form (IE – cassette tape, open reel, music CD, Mp3 CD - including material in lossless ape & flac formats). When trading, I generally like to provide my trading partners with material via Music-CD’s or Data-CD’s & DVD’s in wav, flac and formats. Upon request, I provide Data-DVD’s in the wav format. Wherever possible, I try to avoid sending material on open reel or cassette as this creates material with an additional generation of audio degradation.
When ‘tape traders’ are open to receiving my material via Music-CD media, I will trade on a 3 to 1 ratio (the equivalent of three hours of my material for one hour of the traders material). Where a ‘tape trader’ wishes to trade and will receive mp3 material on a Data-CD from my collection, the trading ratio increases up to 5 to 1.
Traders who already have their material in digital form can generally consider trades at a 1 for 1 basis.
With both tape and digital traders, I remain flexible around these ratios and tend to be on the generous side from my end when the material I’m looking for is in pristine condition or where a trader feels their material is of greater trading value than that which is being requested
A Couple of Trading
Considerations
There is material in my collection that I cannot and will not trade or share due to restrictions imposed by my trading source. When I make a commitment not to share, I must honour that commitment. My commitment stands until such time as that material, in equal or better quality, is being freely shared by others. Those files are highlighted in yellow in the catalogue.
As noted above, I will respect any conditions imposed upon my in a trade, subject to the last sentence in the above paragraph.
Cataloging
I use a duel approach to cataloguing.
1) Microsoft Excel – This allows me to mass catalogue and effectively track multiple aspects of the radio material. These include the obvious such as program name, date, and file location. Because it is a multi-featured database, I also track sound quality (a two part grading process) the program genre, network broadcast (including AFRS), whether commercials are present, commercials cut, sustained, etc. The downfall of the simple database is that it does not allow for some of the features found with OTTER.
2) OTTR – I also catalogue with OTTER in order to provide continuity with the general MP3 OTR community. It also provides a helpful vehicle for assessing the accuracy of dates, program titles and the like. It’s file renaming feature is one of the best I’ve found including the addition of program episode numbers to the process. OTTER has, of course, some limitations. These include the inability to interface with other programs such as Excel. In time, I would hope that an efficient text export feature would be incorporated. Additionally, within a series OTTER cannot accept multiple programs of the same date. This is particularly a problem with shows that were broadcast on the same date. An example of this is found in bid band remotes from NBC where the band may be featured on one or two 15 minute blocks that are clearly separate broadcasts (as identified with the network chimes between the two)
Sound Grading
There are lots of great folks collecting OTR today. One of the most significant issues is how we identify the sound quality of the material that we have. Most of the collectors engaging in MP3 exchange and free distribution provide others with no information on the quality of the actual material. This makes it virtually impossible, without listening to the material, to know if one’s copy is better or poorer than others. This degrades our hobby and leads to the furtherance of poor quality copies. Regrettably even the OTRRG has not tackled this problem.
We will not effectively purge the OTR community of poor sounding material until we universally make an effort to identify the material that is circulating. I use a two-pronged approach to grading sound quality in my Excel database. These are found in fields G & H. In fields ‘G’, I rate the overall sound quality according to a prescribed set of criteria that I have been using for the last thirty years. These are as follows:
E Excellent, minimal flaws or imperfections. TO hear imperfections, one must listen closely – a pleasant exception to most OTR but relatively common with well recorded recent material. All low generation material
Vg/e Very Good to Excellent - may include minimal surface noise or minor imperfections that can be noticed. All low generation material. Recordings that conform generally to a criteria of no imperfections but that were recorded over a lower grade phone line feed would be classified as vg/e
v/g Very Good, highly listenable, imperfections do not impair ease of listening. These may be multi generation recordings or low generation recordings with some noticeable imperfections.
g/vg Good to Very Good, a misnomer, imperfections make some or all parts of recording, hard to hear, every word can be understood, generally these are multi generation recordings but may include low generation recordings with significant disc noise.
G Good (not), imperfections so sever as to creating parts or all of the material as at or on the verge of being . Because I subscribe to the philosophy that a bad archival recording is better than none, I do retain these – always with the hope or improvement.
In field ‘H’, I outline either the reason the material is either superior or what the causes of imperfections are:
Artifacts digital artifacts, errors in encoding to mp3 and poor or over processing with noise reduction tools, unfortunately so common but easy to avoid. Our goal should be to clearly identify these and work to purge them with better copies.
Distortion distortion, often from over modulation at the source or during analogue or digital recording.
Muffled sound is “heavy” muffled, unclear, generally speaking one cannot hear or discern the sound of the letter “S” even when clearly spoken or sung.
Static Static, usually but not always from material recorded over AM or FM radio post OTR era.
Scratch Disc scratch, reserved for identifying material where the source material has unusually heavy surface noise.
11UC A numerical figure followed by the letters “UC” denotes that the file has been up-converted from a lower quality digital mp3 source. The numbers denote the original encode frequency rate (ex – 11 kB/s). Where the letters are not preceded by a number, this indicates that I have reviewed the file and determined that it was up-converted prior to my receipt of the file.