Over the course of our travels, your editors have amassed a large collection of airchecks and other audio snippets. We cannot present but a small fraction of that audio here, for practical reasons if not legal ones. This on-line collection focuses on legal IDs—the announcements U.S. stations make every hour, on the hour (if they are obeying FCC rules) giving their callsign and community of license. We also have a few station identifications from non-U.S. stations, particularly Canadian stations which have official callsigns and communities of license just like U.S. stations do.
As of 2015-03-19, this collection includes more than 3,800 audio clips, representing more than 2,900 stations.
All of the clips we have are listed in the master index by callsign. For convenience, we also have a listing by facility, in state, community, frequency order, and a listing by BostonRadio.org market assignment; these last two listings include only stations with an FCC-assigned facility identification number.
If you should find a factual error in the details of any one of our listings, please let us know at the address below. We regret that we are unable to accept clips from persons not affiliated with The Archives @ BostonRadio.org.
Each index entry is presented in the same format:
In this case, a two-station ID is offered; the identity of the stations in question is given in the order they are mentioned in the ID (including the frequency, whether or not it is mentioned), with the actual station recorded, if we know it, shown in italics. In the facility index and in station profile pages, the specific station responsible for the clip appearing at that point (or in that page) is shown in bold. We give the year of recording, the length of the clip, the size in kbytes, and any comments we have. The icons give other information about the clip: whether it contains a station jingle [J], whether the ID occurs during a local break in network programming (such as sports play-by-play) [N], whether there are noticeable recording defects in the clip (such as receiver static or tape wow) [Q], whether the station was recorded during special holiday programming [H], and whether the clip is mixed down to mono for presentation here (usually done on stations we know to have been recorded in mono) [M].
We generally refrain from commenting on whether the ID actually meets the legal requirements, but we try to give you enough information to decide for yourself. There is often enough context to tell whether the ID was broadcast "when regularly required".
Many of these clips come from older source tapes which in most cases are not dated with any specificity; the most specific dating we can provide for these clips is the year of recording, and in at least a few cases we probably got that wrong, too. This does mean that clips are sometimes listed out of strict chronological order, as the database does not know any better ordering. Corrections are always welcome at the address below.
All of these recordings are presented in Ogg Vorbis format, using the default quality setting and other compression parameters. We choose to use Ogg Vorbis for its superior audio quality at this level of compression and freedom from software patents; we hope you will make the same choice. (Vorbis is a variable-bit-rate codec; the average bit rate on these samples ranges from 60 to 90 kbit/s, with audio quality comparable to MPEG-2 layer III at 128 kbit/s.) There are Vorbis decoders available for all popular operating systems and multimedia players. Our preferred player is VLC.
The original source medium for the older recordings is audio cassette, which has been recorded and in many cases dubbed at a variety of levels and equipment. For this presentation, all audio levels have been normalized at -6 dBFS RMS; in some cases this amplification has resulted in audible tape hiss. In addition, all samples are encoded with Replay Gain; use a Replay Gain-compatible player for best results.
If you're looking for more than what we have here, why not stop by tophour.com and enjoy even more station IDs, including many from markets we're unlikely ever to get to?
Copyright in these recordings remains with the station or the licensor of the production elements. We believe that our use of these recordings constitutes "fair use" under all four factors of the statutory test (17 USC 107). If you are the copyright holder of one of these snippets and would like to remove your material from the site, please contact us at the electronic mail address below or use the contact information in our domain registration.
Compilation copyright ©1995–2014, The Archives @ BostonRadio.org.