Aug 26 2004
Whole Wheat Radio
The ONLY thing I like about working in Detroit is being able to listen to Whole Wheat Radio often, sitting in my hotel room here, laughing at Jim’s indifferent irreverence to everything including himself, discovering great independent music.
I started Steel White Table back in February of this year in a similar hotel room in Detroit, listening to Jim’s rants and his great selection of tunes. Read my past posts about WWR do get an idea what they’re all about. If you like the Billboard Top-100000, you probably won’t like WWR.
Coincidentally, WWR’s Blog just posted an Article About Whole Wheat Radio In Fairbanks Paper. He includes a link to a PDF version of the article.
Jody, do you know if there’s any way to view WWR entire ‘catalogue’ of requestable songs? Today I found out that they have Guy Clark — one of the best country & western storytellers still alive — and I would have requested him long ago had I realized that WWR had his music (at least one albums of his anyway).
No, I never tried. Post your query on WWR while some regulars are there, like J-Walk, Sol, etc.
Phillip: Theoretically, yes… but… no.
If you go into the requests page and leave all of the criteria blank, it should theoretically bring up everything in the catalog. Problem is, that is REALLY intensive on bandwidth and the server. So, I think it only brings up the first 8000 matches or something.
You would need to put in some sort of filter to narrow down your search. Try “male” or “female,” but even that probably won’t narrow it down enough. There are almost 30,000 songs in the library right now. Assuming half are male and half are female, that still only narrows it down to 15,000. You really need to try something more specific like an artist or album name.
Don’t know what else to suggest. Maybe Jimbob has a suggestion?
Sol is correct. Here’s a sort of hack to at least see all the artists (who have 5 or more songs in the library) … go to “Request Next Hour’s Show” and scroll to the bottom of the page. The “Any Artist” pulldown is a list of all the artists in the library. It doesn’t help you make a request, but it is a text list of the artists. Techies could “View Source”, find that chunk of html where the list is, copy it into a text editor and replace all the HTML with nulls and you’d have a printable list of artists.
I just put “List of Artists” on my to-do list. We’ve needed it for a long time so that when new artists or new listeners show up, they have a quick way to see “Who the heck do they play here?” Planned release: July 18th, 2008. :-)
Excellent, Jim. Until then, I’ll follow your suggestion (unless I discover I’m too inept to figure it out, in which case I’m going to open up more of Jody’s single-malt scotch and fall asleep drunk tonight — I’m at Jody’s house while he’s away, and there’s nothing he can do about it, ha-ha).
I TOTALLY don’t understand that whole wheat radio advertisement animated gif..
There’s reeds and some instrument, then the little 16 colour people running around for some reason, blowing something or other up (a radio?), then a bubble with a moose in it? The only thing I understand is the train with alaska on it, cause it’s based in alaska.
It scares me.