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

[Roger Carruthers]

I thoroughly second the file naming convention, if only for the reasons I¹ve
brought up here before.
I started trying to make sense of my collection of downloaded recordings
recently, and it¹s a nightmare working out what¹s what! I also tried
building a Peel tapes database for an SQL assignment at college not so long
ago, and even just populating it with a handful of tapes, I was cursing
whoever had named the damn things ;-)
 Just to throw another idea into the mix, it occurred to me that a server
running something like Dot Tunes (see http://www.dottunes.net/ ) might be a
nice idea for our accumulated wealth of recordings. We¹ve been running a
sound effects server using Dot Tunes on an old G4 where I work for a year or
so and it¹s been rock solid. The great thing about this approach is that you
can just listen to stuff even if you don¹t want to actually download it, or
audition before you download, and you can control access to the server by IP
address, and/or password etc. We¹re actually running an older version,
before they adopted the rather convoluted plug-in model, but it¹s had quite
heavy use was pretty much a no-brainer to set up. Just a thought, anyway...
Cheers
Roger 
 


On 29/07/2008 20:23, "festive50@..."
<festive50@...> wrote:

>  
>  
> 
> 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
>> >
>> >
> 
>  
>