Members Section Update

Updates to paid member offerings

Members Section Update

I’ve got a quick update for paying members of the blog.

First of all, thank you to everybody who reads The Baseball Replay Journal, whether you are a paying subscriber or not. Your participation, comments, and emails have helped create a strong sense of community, and are extremely important to me.

I do not plan to hide my daily posts behind a paywall at any point in time in the future. On the contrary, I strongly believe that important discussions about baseball history and the simulations we know and love really ought to take place in the open, where people can contribute and discuss without worrying about payment.

Having said that, this is a monetized blog, and I naturally hope to attract paying subscribers. Because of that, I’ve tried to create a few incentives to pay.

One new development you’ve almost certainly noticed is The Baseball Replay Journal Podcast. I’m still new to the podcasting world, and am trying to find an approach that best fits my time schedule and the theme of this blog. My goal is to discuss topics on the podcast that aren’t necessarily a good fit for The Baseball Replay Journal YouTube channel, but topics that are still a bit deeper than the average blog post. As usual, it’s going to take a few months for the podcast to start reaching its potential. Access to complete episodes requires a paid subscription; however, I will always provide a somewhat lengthy preview for free for those who are curious.

Speaking of YouTube — something you might not have noticed is that I’ve included links to downloads of my most recent YouTube videos on the Members Area. YouTube’s Content ID system occasionally requires me to make changes to videos. I’ve started uploading the originals to a cloud file folder in part for personal storage, and in part to share the videos in their original format for anybody who is interested.

The big news, though, is that I’m returning to remastering and updating the baseball audio collection.

A few friends and I started this massive audio collection something like 20 years ago. We converted audio tapes to low quality MP3 files at the time, since storage was pretty expensive.

Storage is relatively cheap these days, which means that we can now save audio broadcasts in much higher quality formats.

However, many of the source files have mastering issues. Usually the levels have been set too high by whoever was making digital copies of the masters. I’ve started to correct these games by reducing the harsh volume of the originals. My plan is to use the lightest touch possible. For the sake of our eardrums, though, it’s probably best to keep the highest levels to around -6 dB whenever possible.

It’s not going to be perfect, but hopefully it will result in a better listening experience.

I know that there are YouTube channels out there that offer a lot of complete vintage radio broadcasts. Some of those games came originally from the collection a few of us shared years ago; others probably come from free archives, such as the various collections over at the Internet Archive. However, the quality of those recordings is suspect. That will particularly stand out if you try to sample parts of those recordings in a personal project. Hopefully these somewhat quieter levels will help.

Anyway, the other important thing is that these new recordings will be in FLAC format (16/44), not MP3. I don’t know the specific details of the lineage of these recordings. However, I can certainly say that whatever recording I’ve managed to come across will be given to you in a truly lossless format. I’ll also stay with 16/44 to prevent the file sizes from getting completely out of control, and because it’s a little bit easier to then compress the files down to MP3 if you want.

I’ll be adding new recordings eventually as well. And, if you are a collector of vintage sports radio broadcasts, please contact me. I’m always on the lookout for new things to add.

Note that I will no longer upload these broadcasts to YouTube. I did that with two of the 1975 World Series audio recordings. The problem isn’t YouTube policies. The problem is that I’d much rather provide the full recordings as a bonus for paying subscribers, and plan on using those broadcasts to complement my other video and audio projects instead. After all, I’m guessing more people have time to watch a 10 minute video than to listen to a 2 1/2 hour game.

Thank you once again for your support! I’ve got a lot of ideas, and hope that you’ll enjoy what is coming soon.