In July, my local library wants to put some of my antique radios on display. There will be everything from crystal sets to 1920's battery sets and early AC sets, to 1930's and early 1940's sets. The reference librarian, who will be in charge of the display, thought it would be great if we could use my 12AT6/12CS6 transmitter (or my AES phono oscillator) to play some OTR through some of the sets (most likely my AK sets or my Radiola 17, since the radios could be put in the display cabinet and the Type M horn and Type E and 100A speakers could be put on stands outside the cabinet).

What I would LIKE to have is one or more CD's containing radio broadcasts, each one appropriate to a single era (1920's, 1930's, 1940's), with not just music and entertainment-type shows (i.e., Amos 'n' Andy, Weird Circle, etc.) but also commercials, news broadcasts, etc., so that listeners can get a reasonable approximation of what old-time radio was really like.

I am having great difficulty finding free MP3 downloads of the commercials, news broadcasts, and even a good range of 1920's era music (all I can seem to find is "Leapfrog" by Les Brown).

Can somebody please help me out here?

Well, I just found one thing on the Internet Archive that will be quite suitable for the purpose. It's the complete, 19-hour broadcast day recording for WJSV, Sept. 21, 1939. Not the "variety over time" that I had origianlly intended, but it shows very well what a day of radio broadcasting would have been like "back in the day".

You beat me to it. I was just about to paste the link to it. This site has a large collection of shows:

http://otrrlibrary.org/index.html

Have you tried a program called Otter? It can list shows by year, month or day. Available here:

http://otrr.org/pg02b_otter.htm

Use it to find what's available, then go to the OTR site above to find the shows to download.

Try OTR.Net
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... MQ&cad=rja
or one of the largest I have found, it has everything from obscure regional old time radio shows and 1st generation recordings, all the way through Allied/Axis war time propaganda.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... Jw&cad=rja
Just click on OTR Downloads on the left of the screen.
Enjoy
EDIT: Also check out MANY airchecks on:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q= ... 9w&cad=rja

Many shows have the commercials removed, but there are still a lot of them that haven't. The current Dragnet shows that I have all seem to retain the Fatima Cigarettes commercials. I've heard some interesting Signal Oil spots during The Whistler and Blue Coal ads during The Shadow.

Right this moment I'm listening to the Sept. 21st, 1939 WJSV broadcast that I downloaded and burned last night, and I think it's about perfect for what I am trying to do. It has ALL the advertisements (for both local businesses and for nationally available products), news updates about the war in Europe (WWII had only begun three weeks before, when Germany invaded Poland), music, quiz shows, comedies, soap operas, a baseball game, a presidential speech before Congress, etc. - in other words, radio "frozen in time". There is even an announcement early in the broadcast stating that it was being recorded for posterity.

If you want great 1920s pop music and a few music radio transcriptions from time to time, try Radio Dismuke......

http://loudcity.com/stations/radio-dismuke

To make MP3 discs you need .wmv files on your computer, Windows Media Player and when you go to burn the files, make the change from a Music Disc to a Data Disc in the menu area of the burn playlist.....then you will get an MP3 disc recorded.

If you are still having trouble, let me know. I think I have what you need on all counts, already in MP3 format.

Garret

Well, other than the 1939 WJSV broadcast, so far, no dice. Could you please shoot me a PM and let me know what you have?

http://www.archive.org/details/radioprograms

They have the whole day(24 hours) of cbs on June 6th 1944 on mp3s. I use it when I do WWII reenactments. one of the other reenactors has a gutted philco radio that just has a speaker and I plug my mp3 player into it.

they have thousands of OTR programs

Yep, that's where I got most of my OTR stuff from, including the WJSV 1939 broadcast.

Awesome, I can finally put all of those gigabytes to use!

A few years ago I made up a CD/MP3 of about 8 hours worth of OTR. I tried to throw in a few station breaks, and then even posted a "Radio Schedule" in front so that people could see what's playing and what's coming up next. Example, 2:00 The Shadow, 2:30 Your Hit Parade, 3:00 The Lone Ranger, etc. I even threw in a few ads and station breaks, but even so I realized that by mid-afternoon I was about a half-hour out of kilter -- I guess I needed to throw in more ads.

There are a few tough parts to doing this. First it sems the sound quality varies from one recording to another. It actually sounds cut-and-pasted. Second, the shows were not on the same network; one show is NBC, the next might be Mutual.

It's very hard to find authentic ads, outside the shows themselves. Certain transcriptions include news and other announcements, and a few have an actual station break at the very end. Example, I've got some Jack Benny episodes that state WMAQ in Chicago -- they also say "stay tuned to Big Town, next." Which means I suppose my next show should be an episode of Big Town.

I would really like to make up a list, or rearrange my recordings in such a way as to make this easy to do. One easy way to make a very small radio station is to connect an MP3 player to an SSTRAN. However you can meticulously sort several programs, commercials, and station breaks in order, and these players have a tendency to mix them up. I would rather set up crates and playlists and actually use a DJ program to play them in the correct order. This means a laptop, larger than an MP3 player or portable CD, but it gives much better control.

Another option: have you listened to Bob Merritt's stream? It is online, and I listen frequently during the day. Stream to desktop computer, into SSTRAN, Three or four radios through the house tuned to 1470. No station breaks between programs unless they came from that particular transcription, but it still sounds great and I personally don't think the public is going to even notice -- after all, they only listen for a few minutes at a time anyway.

Well, my WJSV recording from September 1939 went over well, as did the radio display. They stopped playing the recording after about two weeks, though, as the lit-up Silvertone console was attracting TOO much attention from small children (at least one of whom apparently thought it was fun to poke the loosely mounted eye tube back into the cabinet - I had to re-set it a couple of times). No real harm done, though. I gave the CD to the library to put in their archives - I already have it on my hard drive and can easily burn another copy if I want to.

It sounds like it was a hit, that's great so many people were interested. I still remember the first time I saw a tube radio, a Philco 41-296, at the fair. I asked the fellow if it worked, he wasn't sure, but he pulled it out and let me look behind it. I expected it to be packed full of wires and tubes, not so. I just couldn't believe they would build something so large to house a chassis and a speaker. It definitely left an impression.

+1 At first I thought they were filled with tubes and wires and "stuff" from top to bottom, not the case!