KDRK is kind of an odd "radio" station in that it isn't broadcast over the radio at all. It is broadcast over Drake University's on-campus cable TV network. The audio created in the radio studio is broadcast on a specific channel with community calendar and Drake ads on the video. Students on campus can tune to the channel and listen to the broadcast. Since the channel is only carried on the Drake campus, those who are off campus could not be enlightened by the show.
When we started making the show we decided to tape it. The easiest way to do this (since the tape recorder in the studio was broken) was to record to a VCR sitting back in our dorm room tuned to the right channel. Unfortunately, the only VCR readily available was Tom's machine and it only does monaural. So although the audio was mainly played from CDs and thus originally a decent quality, it was piped through the cable TV network and then recorded by an old mono VCR.
Storing audio on the audio track of a VHS tape is not ideal. So after the show i would go back to the room and transfer the show to standard audio tape by playing the recording on the VCR into a tape deck after passing the signal through an audio splitter to convert the mono signal into "stereo." Unfortunately, the only tape deck available was one i had purchased used for $7.50. There's a reason i got it for so cheap. The tape recorder adds hiss to recordings, is rather touchy and adds a loud pop or static to the recordings if disturbed by vibration. ( And walking across the room while recording is sufficient to incur the wrath of the recorder such that it adds a static burst). Since each show is 2 hours, 120 minute tapes were used. Needless to say, the quality of the audio tape isn't all that great. And since the VHS recordings have been erased so the tapes could be reused, the audio tape was the only surviving copy of the shows.
Not all shows were properly transferred to audio tape. Some weren't recorded at all and have been completely lost. Once the recordings were made i put them in a box, where they sat untouched for about 2 years. Then i decided it was time to create this web site. I wanted to make the recordings available. In came MP3 technology.
To get the tapes into the MP3 format, i took my tape deck (the same one as used two years earlier to record the tapes) out, dusted it off, and plugged it into the input of my SoundBlaster Awe64 Gold sound card. I played the tapes and recorded at full CD quality directly to hard drive. Since each side of a tape is an hour long, that means i ended up with a whole bunch of ~600 MB audio files. I chopped the silence off the beginning and end of the files and spliced each show together into a monster 2 hour CD quality file, which i then converted to mono (since the audio was originally recorded on mono equipment it wasn't true stereo anyway). I didn't just record in mono because for some reason my sound card would just combine the two stereo signals to get mono, and this would result in a large waveform that would get clipped and sounded really awful.
From 2 hour audio file to MP3 was fairly easy. I uploaded the recordings from the Windoze NT machine they were recorded on (done on that machine since it had the good sound card) to my main Linux box, a Pentium II-450. I tried compressing one of the files at several quality settings. Since the quality was already faily poor from all the formats it had been through, i was afraid to lose any more. I found that compressing as a 128 kbit mono MP3 resulted in no discernible quality loss, so i used that. The encoding was done with bladeenc 0.76 and it took about an hour to reduce each 2 hour file from wav format to MP3.
After that the files were uploaded to the server. Foolishly, i deleted the originals so that the copies on the server were the only copies in existence. A few days later the server was either broken into or suffered a hardware failure of some sort (i never determined with certainty which one) and the freshly-created Multiple Personalities Archive along with many other files was irretrievably lost. Which meant only one thing: time to recreate them from scratch.
Since the quality of the files the first time wasn't all that great due to the problems of using a very old tape deck that would add loud crackles to the audio if you did so much as sit down in a chair in the same room, i decided to use a better deck. I borrowed a much nicer deck from my housemate Ian and proceeded to redo the recordings. And this time since i had higher quality files i decided to try to do a better job of preserving the quality. I found that instead of converting the files to monaural by mixing the left and right channels that i would get far better sound just by grabbing the right channel and discarding the left. This is because the two channels were offset by a fraction of a second (on the original tapes, probably caused by the bad tape deck they were recorded with) and when mixed would blur together resulting in the audio being muffled. By just taking the right channel i had a much crisper sound. After this i ran the files through a filter to remove some of the background hiss, which took about 4 hours per file. After all this, i uploaded the files to the 450 MHz Pentium II and used BladeEnc 0.91 (an upgrade from the first time around) to do the MP3 encoding. Then i burned the MP3s to a set of 3 CDs just to make sure they were safe and uploaded to the server.
So as you can see, these audio streams have been through a lot. They aren't exactly crystal clear pristine recordings. They contain some hiss and static and even the occasional loud crackling pop. But under the circumstances, i think they sound pretty good.