CBSRMT / CBS Radio Mystery Theater

I like to listen to entire OTR/Old Time Radio series or seasonal themes.

I began some years ago collecting seasonal shows - ie, listening to a few dozen Christmas shows in successions Halloween, and Thanksgiving (under-represented but very good). I listened to an entire broadcast day from WJSV on 9/21/39 (http://www.archive.org/details/CompleteBroadcastDay), and the entire X-1 series, also on archive.org and which I'll try to post here.

(Finally found a host and can stream successfully with a popup, gotta get some css figured out but it's serviceable.)

I'd like to turn next to CBS Mystery Radio Theater. The entire series is over 14Gb (1,399 shows - interesting number to end with.) Getting them onto an mp3 player in batches will be interesting. And presuming I listen to an episode a day every day - unlikely - it would take me almost 4 years.

Techie aside: I downloaded the entire 14Gb file from archive.org but could not open with any of the common zip utilities I use - I tried IZArch, Winzip, 7Zip, PKZip for Windows, each with varying success, but none that would unzip all 1,399 episodes. So I used a download utility for Firefox - http://www.downloadhelper.net/ - set the limit to 2,000 files and downloaded each one at a time. Turns out those files I couldn't extract from the zipfile also can't be downloaded in this fashion. However, the 0k files number less than 300, so it should be easy to download the rest individually.)

Of course CBSRMT (CBS Radio Mystery Theater) was the 70's-80's radio drama hosted by EG Marshall that introduced the medium to a new generation that were being raised on television. I happened to be one of those that loved radio just as much, but I was too young to understand that I was experiencing a revival, and unfortunately, a homage, to a fading format.

Most would probably place The Golden Age of Radio somewhere in the 40's-50's, but you can easily find programming from the 20's through the 70's. (I just listened to a Fibber McGee and Molly New Years episode from 1936, in which, interestingly, Fibber has a distinct Irish accent that comes and goes.)

But radio is alive and well with the spoken word; public radio has outstanding game shows (for lack of a better term), talk, and something you might call "stand-up dramedy" like the Moth Hour - not sure what else to call it, one moment you're laughing, the next crying; it's quirky and often wonderful; but aside from the recent revival of The Twilight Zone, the days of the days of radio comedy and drama are past, at least as they were once produced, and are but fleeting recollections upon seeing an old photo or a radio in an antique shop.)

Listen to CBSRMT on Live365...
http://www.wix.com/myafcha1/cbsrmt