[peel] I spend two weeks in the hot spa tubs of Budapest and...

[festive50@...]

Whoa Ken Whoa!
A mighty ambitious project indeed and nobody has commented yet. Maybe most
people think that this beyond the scope of this group.
I for one am interested, as I had already started a database along these
lines but never finished.
It consisted of a lot of my tracklistings, listings from Lorcan's website
plus listings extracted from the BBC's listing sites.
It currently stands at about 20,000 tracks and is in my preferred database
software (MS Access). Although Excel can be used for DBs, Access is
purpose built for such a task. It can however be exported to Excel or
ASCII.

Briefly, I was "A listener writes" on p136 in Ken's latest tome.

Basically
I started taping JP whilst in hospital on 2 occasions in 1987
My nephew took up the baton but with gusto and created about 300 tapes
(1990-1992).  About 10 years later he started giving me packs of 10 tapes
(including the tracklistings) for birthday and christmas presents.
As I listened to them I checked and edited the tracklistings
I received the last of these last Christmas.
A lot of these tapes tracklistings weren't checked and edited as I'd
abandoned this project and just used to play them in the car.

Ironically, I was in hospital in May and returned to this project of
annotating these listings and am still doing so (about another 80 tapes to
go).
I'd also started digitising these tapes and putting them up on the Peel
Server which I ran and which sadly died while I was in hospital.
I've just built a new IBM/Windows 2003 server. I just need to get a
SCSI/IDE adaptor and I can then repopulate with all the shows I have and
get back to digitising my 600+ tapes.
I did start adding to my collection with the various shares (DivShare,
RapidShare etc.),advertised on this site but I found them very hit and
miss. ie. where links became out of date, or didn't work, or you had to
pay for premium download otherwise you could only DL once a day. I didn't
really get on with BitTorrent either. There was always Gary's server but
somehow my original log in credentials no longer work.
You mentioned the various fields Ken. But what would be really useful is a
standardised file naming convention.
I prefer Peel yyyymmdd - Session Artists.mp3/flac etc.
This way, when sorting on file names you get them in chronological date
order.

Phil

> ...just got back to uk from holiday and have now caught up on all the
astonishing correspondence here via my aged dad's PC. First of all, yes,
the seller of the tapes had evidently tried to email me but this was after
I left the country, sorry. But it all worked out ok, thanks to dee dee,
rocker and everyone. And despite pledging my twenty quid in
advance, I also appear to have missed the cough-up period, sorry. I agree
with Mark, these are probably low-Q FM recordings rather than AM, as
Martin says, yes, from October 71 all Peel's late evening shows (excluding
the first 9 months of 75, the BBC '3-day week'
> period) were on the Radio 2 FM frequency as well as R1 AM, until R1 FM
for almost 24 hrs launched in Oct 88 anyway. Some friends gave me their
prized shoeboxes of Peel show tapes (about 30 tapes in all, mostly 79-81,
I think) when I was doing In Session Tonight, taped on a stereo system,
but time and decay made them v muffled, although they can be listened to
just about (actually I wonder if I still have those
somewhere...?). AM recordings at 10pm-midnight would be v
> crackly, possibly. Like others, I am happy to hear shows in any
> quality short of unlistenable, and not just for what Peel says, but for
the totality of the experience, and simply to know they survive.
>
> I am sure it has occurred to others that those doing the digitising not
only need to agree on a digital file format standard (which
> appears to have been done
> already!), but also a cataloguing system and application. Whoever is
doing the divvying out needs to give each tape a clear number before the
digitising gets under way. Then there are the agreed fields of data
required for each tape (date, duration, featured items, running order?,
> notes, edits, etc.. to be discussed), and the application: You could use
a database, if there is one that everyone is likely to have which is
simple, or (don't snigger), excel is pretty universal, I did both books'
sessionography in it and my big bro does mutliple data daily for an
international engineering company with excel files containing thousands
and thousands of entries or rows, all relating to each other, so it can do
almost anything we'd want, as long as we agreed on the fields or columns,
surely? I think you would need two
> spreadsheets that talked to each other: one with a single row of agreed
main data for each every TAPE/ SHOW; then one which was an individual
> sheet for each TAPE / SHOW with the full track listing and any notes,
even maybe a field for transcribing Peel's links... Just a thought...
>
> On the continuing issue of some kind of eventual Peel Archive online, I
too have been mulling this over. I think for the time being let's just
share the stuff and document what is out there and is emerging.
Eventually, though, I suspect something might be possible. A friend of
mine, a professor at a with-it institution, has been advising the BBC on
its digital strategy and claims their new objective is to liase with and
facilitate other social networks, and not try to do it all themselves.
However, in that context the (incomplete, out of date and frequently
bonkers) 'official' peel pages occasionally accessible via Radio 1's
website are a peculiar exception! And so would be the rumour I have heard
from inside sources recently that BBC Worldwide is working on a project to
create a website where people can listen to and purchase for download BBC
session tracks (not just Peel's, please note!), both
current and from the archive. But there is a world of difference between
doing this for discrete, identifiable copyright tracks by named artists,
and complete show recordings of variable quality: even if that rumour is
true, I doubt they would even contemplate the enormity of the task of
making complete shows available in this manner. But for someone else to
stream a rotating sequence of archive shows might be possible even under
existing
> copyright legislation, if the BBC chose to recognise the credibility of
the organisation doing it (it sells TV shows for repeats by any TV channel
in the world, so why not...?). If we were to demonstrate our capacity to
do this by how we deal with these new tapes, for example, that might go
some way to helping. Any such official website /
> archive / association project would of course need the BBC, Radio 1,
Sheila's and the Selwoods' consent. But if we got the last two, or even
three, of those, then the institional support from the top of the
organisation might just fall into line, eventually. I can
> envisage some form of
> trust /association being recognised by these stakeholders. Such a site
could then be much more than that and grow data organically, with
eventually a data entry for every show, which would indicate if it is
known to exist in any of the public or private archives we can
> identify (and thereby request and identify those that are missing from
any visitors to the site).
>
> I feel, however, as I say, that's all some way off in the future. The
first step towards any such formal recognition or credibility of this
group as the official custodians of the Peel legacy/archive -
> (alongside how we deal with the tapes!) - might be perhaps some form of
face to face meeting, a Peel Listeners' Convention, which could seek,
among other fun things (gigs, guests, debates, etc), to
> finalise and ratify a draft constitution or terms-of-reference
> articulating the association's aims, membership, and so on, which could
be circulated in draft electronically in advance. Sounds
> dreary, i know, but if we were to decide to be truly serious about this
(including maybe seeking national lottery funding - I am not joking, there
have been other digital musical archiving projects that have won cash from
this source!), we'd need to do that kind of
> thing...
>
> ken
>
>