Hi. Thus saith the lordH:
I am the source for several of the Vintage KROQ MP3s that are being shared via this forum.
I urge all of you to visit my KROQ web page,
http://www.mykec.com/mykec/kroq.php, and peruse my KROQ MP3 indices.
I'd never heard of KROQ until sometime in 1990 when I was working in Tulsa and a female coworker of mine saw the Duran Duran logo pin that I was wearing on my shirt one day. She was a hard core Durannie (and still is). We began talking about cool music and eventually she loaned me a few of her tapes of this L.A. radio station she loved so much. She had friends in L.A. and every time she'd go to visit them in the summer or during winter break she was sure to bring blank cassettes with her so she could carry a little KROQ with her when she ultimately had to return to Oklahoma. Her tapes were primarily recorded in August 1987 and December/January 1988/89 but she also had some which were recorded in February 1982 and one from January 1, 1985. I believe these were copies of tapes which were originally recorded by her friends - hence the less than optimum fidelity of the February 4, 1982, recordings.
She loaned her tapes to me in 1990 so that I could copy them for myself. Some 12 years later she loaned them to me again so I could transfer them to CD-Rs for both of us. Today, I usually don't bother with burning them to CD-Rs and simply keep and play them in FLAC and MP3 formats. Amazingly, the 2nd time around, I found more vintage KROQ in her collection than she's previously loaned to me in the previous decade.
In 1997 I found another source for some 1982 recordings of KROQ. I received 3 CD-Rs from him but eventually lost touch with him. The email address I was using to communicate with him has been defunct for a long time and I do not remember his name. It would be great to locate him again and see if he has more for which I could trade.
Finally in 2002 a 3rd source contacted me and I too remastered some of his cassettes - the uncut 60-minute recordings from July 1982 plus quite a few more. My computer was slower then and my hard drive space very limited so it was difficult to process a lot of files the sizes of which these recordings required. Progress was very slow.
Today, however, my hard drive space is huge and my computer a faster model. He has begun again to send his tapes to me in the mail so that I may remaster them and upload the MP3s for him online. During the past week or so I have added nearly another 7 hours of KROQ to my ever-expanding collection...and more are on the way.
I want everyone to know that when I remaster these tapes, I work very hard to ensure that they are the best they can possibly be without affecting their fidelity by using noise-reduction software. I'm not out to hide the fact that these files are made from tapes. But I do transfer the tapes at slower than normal speed using a Marantz PMD-740 Professional 4-track cassette deck because it has a solid, steady motor. I record them directly to disc with a Pioneer Music CD-RW recorder. I do not use my computer's noisy soundcard as an input device. I use SOX to split the stereo WAVs into two mono WAVs - one for each channel. I use "normalize" to balance each channel's loudness. I use Audacity to join the two WAVs back into stereo. For each side of tape I extract a song which I also have on a commercial CD. I look for "landmarks" in each recording of the song and trim off the tops-n-tails of both in the exact same points within the song. I then use my calculator program to divide the byte counts of each file to learn the adjustment value necessary to make them play in sync. I then use SOX to adjust the speed of the entire WAV by that exact amount and - if the quotient is correct - I *finally* have a the makings of a master WAV to compress into FLAC and to encode as an MP3. But before I do that I also like to load each master WAV back into Audacity and add short fade-ins and fade-outs to the beginnings and endings of each file. Sometimes I'll even trim out the glitches in recordings where the pause button was pressed while the recording was being made. Sometimes I'll even use an unobtrusive crossfade to blend the two segments back together.
So as you can see, I put a lot of time and effort into the creation of each of these vintage KROQ MP3s because I believe they're of great enough historical (and fun!) value to be worth the extra effort.
Sometimes I get emails from people asking how they may obtain copies of my files from me. I don't sell my KROQ MP3s. I *prefer* to trade them for more KROQ recordings to be added into my collection. Last Christmas for the first time ever, I finally had enough KROQ in MP3 format to fill a 4.2 GB DVD-R. 11 of my friends and family members received copies of those tucked inside their Christmas cards. This year I'll probably do it again with all the new KROQ I can remaster and add to the set between now and the time I have to mail them out.
Meanwhile, if you have any KROQ cassettes that you would like to have remastered, contact me via my website.
If you would like a DVD-R full of my KROQ MP3s, arrange to trade with me a DVD-R full of stuff you have that I might want. We just might be able to work out a deal. That would sure be easier than downloading them all!
Also, if you like my web site and would like a comparable one constructed for your own purposes, whatever that may be, I am taking requests.
Modrock On!
MykeC
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