So you think you want to run an Internet radio station?

Ten years of show planning and production work prepared me for creating TUNEDEX MEMORIES. Even so, I was still reluctant because of the learning curves I knew I would encounter and mentally was NOT prepared to deal with. If that’s not enough to scare you off, keep in mind that I spent 35 years in the computer industry. I almost knew what I was doing at one time.

I faced my fears however, and moved forward. Slowly, to be sure, but forward. Each day was a new struggle with terminology and challenges, both hardware and software. But things didn’t have to be so difficult. My quest would have been a LOT easier if I could have transported back in time about 30 years or so. That’s about how long it’s been since we’ve had any kind of decent customer service in the United States.

I lost an entire day yesterday, dealing with a nuisance problem that almost

If you start a station.... you're crazy!

turned into a catastrophe. Good thing I’m still a good troubleshooter. By this morning, the problem was identified and resolved, with little or no help from the support organizations that are supposed to help me.

My blood pressure shot to heights I haven’t seen or felt since before my middle son left home (for the third time). I spent most of today relaxing and recovering from my encounter with the NEW American commerce. I grew up in a time when the customer was always right. Today, the customer is not only always wrong we’re also treated like idiots.

We are kept at bay by automated phone systems and a pervasive attempt to wear us down so we’ll simply give up and go away. If we do get to talk to someone, you either can’t understand a word they’re saying, or they’re so ill prepared for their job they don’t know what you’re saying. This approach of course is due to greed and the quest for profit above everything.

Yesterday, I spent 7+ hours on the phone with at least 5 different people and sent 8 emails to the company that won’t  publish a phone number. I went from being a happy customer of over three years to asking for a refund and facing the task of finding a new vendor.  I was told what I wanted to hear. I was told outright lies. I was treated like a babbling fool. But at the end of the day, my problem was still unsolved. Being the stubborn person I’ve always been, I wouldn’t give up. I called the company who was apparently the source of the problem. I did so knowing I was neither a customer, nor was I entitled to any customer support. But I called anyway because my instincts told me I would find the answer if I just kept looking.

The good news is, I did solve the problem. I don’t have to change vendors and could help avoid someone else going through what I just did. Of course, that won’t happen. Why you ask? Because in our country, we now value ARROGANCE and POLITICS higher than integrity and knowledge. The very people who did as little as possible to help me say I lack credibility. After all, I’m just a customer. I’m a dime a dozen and don’t deserve respect.

The moral to my story is that everyone wants money, they simply don’t want to work for it. If you ever have a problem you want solved, simply break it down in terms of profit.  When you convince the right person that they’re losing money because of your problem, mark my words, your problem WILL be solved. Not to satisfy you as a customer, but so that “special someone” doesn’t lose any more many than they have to. Welcome to the United States of a-ME-rica.

Like those “Bubbled Under” tunes we play? Frank has many of the 45’s for Sale!

Frank found a private collector who had over 80% of the “Bubbled Under” tunes and MANY of the ones we play on TUNEDEX MEMORIES. If want the original 45’s – be sure to regularly check Frank’s EBay store.   Have a “Bubbled” want list? Contact Frank at fortyfivesfrank@aol.com.

Please help our station with a Donation…

Our blog has grown tremendously – thanks for visiting.  I’ve done a lot of research to pull the great pictures in the slide show and to find the videos for our Vod:Pod. I maintain a list of the videos so you don’t have to do all the work to find them. If you appreciate all my efforts, please help TUNEDEX MEMORIES with a small donation to help us with growing bandwidth charges.  You’ll help greatly with even a $5 donation, so please go HERE.   Please tell your friends they can hear the forgotten hits from the 50’s and 60’s that aren’t played on most stations by going to TUNEDEX MEMORIES!

Chuck Benjamin

The ROOTS of TUNEDEX MEMORIES

I have produced “specialty” shows dedicated to the passion and innocence of the 50’s and 60’s since 1998. However, I’m not a radio veteran. I’m just a guy who has loved music as far back as I can remember, and enjoys sharing that music with others.

Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio I was never far from a radio, and stations like WHK, WERE, and KYW provided the musical backdrop to my formative years. When I want to go back to grade school, junior high or high school memories, there’s always hundreds of songs to take me there.

After I turned 21, and left the Air Force and the Vietnam conflict behind me, I chose a career in the Computer industry, and for the next 40 years or so, collecting music was used as the psychological release I needed from the tension of my job and raising four children. My qualifications as a “collector” include having EVERY song to hit the Billboard Hot 100 since 1955. In 1998 I developed and hosted my first radio show, “the Innocent Age” with the intention of sharing as many of those songs as possible. While I developed a good base of local listeners, I quickly discovered the power of the Internet and soon had listeners all over the country and world-wide.

Two years later, I expanded my show production to twice a week, as my show was added to a Cleveland AM oldies station. I also began to realize the tremendous sense of accomplishment I enjoyed from the producers chair. I developed a weekly Computer show and programmed a 24/7 Country Internet station. Then the music industry flexed it’s muscles, and intimidated many webcasters into abandoning their stations. My station dropped streaming and a few months later changed formats and before I knew what had happened, my show and creativity was darkened.

I stayed involved with production projects like “Dedications from Home” which was a website I developed that allowed U.S. Servicemen deployed around the world to hear messages and song requests from loved ones during the Holidays. I observed from the sidelines as Web radio began to explode once again. The music industry continues to cast shadows on everyone’s efforts, but I decided in 2005 it was time to try again. Cornelius Gould, a local streamer, generously offered a time slot, and I was back on the air, playing what I wanted to play and loving every minute.

I soon enlisted the help of two very good friends who just happened to also be extraordinary music collectors. With our mutual accomplishments, wealth of knowledge and accessibility to music, we offer a musical excursion like no other. The love and passion for the music we play is something Frank Kramer and Steve Petryszyn share with me. We then had the good fortune to meet Kenny Schreiber, who agreed to allow us to re-broadcast shows from his 12 year run of “Echoes of the Past” a marvelous Doo Wop show based in his home town of Baltimore. There are songs we play that are SO GOOD, you can almost hear us singing along. That’s our goal, to get you happy and carefree once again. If you give us a chance, we’ll take you back to a time when you didn’t have a care in the world.

Chuck Benjamin

Please sign our new GUEST BOOK…

Please sign our Guest Book

If you read our blog, come here for the videos, or better – if you listen to Tunedex Memories, we would very much like to know WHO you are and WHERE you’re from.  I’ll be announcing very soon FREE GIVEAWAYS and in order to be eligible – you MUST sign our Guest Book.  If you have any feedback, comments or questions, here’s a great way to let us know and share with others.

• If you’re a past “loyal listener” from our specialty shows, please sign in.
• If you found us through LoudCity and listen to the station, please sign in.
• If you found our blog through a search and come back to read the posts, please sign in.
• If you found us through Vod:Pod and like to watch our videos, please sign in.

We’d love to know who you are…. PLEASE SIGN IN at our Guest Book

Chuck Benjamin • Frank Kramer • Steve Petryszyn • Kenny Schreiber

The Perils of Technology….

As the saga of Tunedex Memories unfolds before my eyes, my little station project almost takes on a life of

Vista sucks!

it’s own. I’ve tried to convey in little snippets on the website some of the frustrations that have stunted my excitement. From the perspective of the listener, it’s pretty simple…. you tune in, the sounds are either there or they’re not. If you’re listening and the sounds stop… you move on. You can’t imagine the panic attacks generated by a software “freeze”. This means the computer has to be brought “down” and restarted. This is not a unique process, because software does tend to “freeze” at times. However… I am hostage to the Operating System that is Vista, which makes these occurrences that more frequent. Oh by the way, multiply that anxiety by a hundred fold if lose my connection to the Internet.

What you’ve never known, is that whenever I have had to restart our server, for many assorted reasons of incompatibility, it took up to an hour to get the program restarted. This past weekend, I updated to the latest version of software and it wouldn’t reload at all. When I finally reached the almighty human voice, I was told I would have to change database handlers to get back up and running. I spent a very stressful 10 hours bouncing between tech support groups just so my Monday evening plans could happen.

The good news? I can now restart and reload relatively quickly. The bad news? The ability to “talk” to my website halted and “froze” the screen for a few days. Monday night when I tried to premiere “The Innocent Age”. The software froze on segment 5 of 8 of the show. I was down for just a few minutes and when we resumed the show, I lost about 12 minutes. The show was supposed to then repeat for the West Coast, but that didn’t work either.

I’ve tried to find pictures to display when songs are playing. “Surfing the web” allowed me to find a lot of them… all it took was TIME… and lots of it. Now I am told I’ll have to re-enter ALL of them because the new database handler doesn’t recognize them. If you ever wonder why “hackers” of the world seem to hate Bill Gates so much, this is but a tiny fragment of explanation why. Whether you’re talking to an outsourced phone helper or local, it gets a bit old when they say things like “Dude, Vista sucks – go back to XP”. First, easier said than done, second – not an option when we bought our server.

So, it’s now Wednesday… I’ve postponed the show until next week and I’m still waiting for that “call back” from technical support. I was up until 4am this morning, but I (without assistance) finally re-established communication to my website, although the pictures are no longer there, and won’t be until I get that “call back”.

I wanted the play list to be at a certain point before I brought back the specialty shows. That took OVER A YEAR, obviously, longer than I expected. After getting the specialty shows back up and running, the next step in my plan was to establish a link for PayPal and ask for contributions. I’m not there yet, but when I get there, I hope you remember reading this before you ignore my request for financial assistance to offset the time and costs of bringing these tunes to you and keeping the blog updated.

Despite the perils of technology and the constant threat of the music industry to kill Internet radio, I push on. Who’s going to rekindle the feelings of our youth? Who’s going to recognize the artists and writers that provided us countless hours of hopes, dreams and emotions? Who’s going to keep alive the memory of this time in our history? It’s a sometimes thankless and dirty job… but somebody’s got to do it.

The Death Of Another Summer…

I recently watched a great little movie called “The Final Season”, about a High School that succumbed to a merger due to cost savings. This school happened to have a GREAT baseball team, one that won TWENTY state championships. But, in the end, they were dissolved anyway. Kind of a sign of the times for America today, light on tradition and heavy on the bottom line.

The passion and love of the game in these kids took me back to my youth, where my love of baseball began. I didn’t play on that many “organized” teams. My first was the “J.W. Porter’s” a Cleveland Class F team that played at Edgewater Park. We rode our bikes and didn’t mind the 20 minute trip. On the way home, win or lose, we hit the Royal Castle on 105th and Madison for Birch Beer and hamburgers. We played our favorite songs on the counter jukebox and enjoyed our treat for less than a quarter.

I played a lot of wiffle ball during this time as well. We’d use cut down broomstick for bats, much like stickball. The thin stick made it harder to hit fast balls, but the length really helped with those outside curve balls. Unfortunately, by using wood instead of plastic, it didn’t take long until we broke the ball and until we got a dollar together to get a new ball, we went to our old stand-by, “rubber ball against the wall”.

A square representing the strike zone was painted on the wall. We took everything seriously back then. We had leagues and even kept statistics. I was so angry with the Indians for trading my favorite player, Rocky Colavito, I became the Detroit Tigers, the team he was traded to. As I made out my lineup, I had to be conscious of those left handed batters like Norm Cash, because if a lefty came up, I had to bat left handed myself. I never hit often as a lefty, but when I did, I usually crushed it.

Those rubber balls weren’t taken for granted either. At 25 cents each, we all wanted them to last. We “broke in” a ball for a week or so, everyone needed a little pitching practice anyway. When the ball got a little softer, then it would find it’s way into real games. If you used a brand new ball, the first problem was that it FLEW if you hit it hard and in some cases, it would actually split and chunks of fresh rubber would be strewn all over the playground. I often think of those days and wonder happened to my old “league” friends. Did they make the High School team? I tried out twice and failed. I could hit with anyone, but had poor depth perception which was not good for an outfielder. This is why I love baseball so much… because I played it. Not on a computer screen or a gameboy, but outside in the sun, breeze, rain and whatever else Mother Nature threw at us. What a game…

Which brings me to this year. It’s over…. again… Whether the Indians trade C.C. Sabathia or not, the season is over. Injuries and a horrible hitting slump have robbed me and SO many other frustrated Indians fans for yet another year. I enjoy watching the kids, but I cringe at the “seasoned veterans” that management is so convinced they need. My nightly prayer is the same… Please Lord, let me live long enough to see the Indians win the World Series…

Radio Stations….

I’ve only worked at two REAL radio stations.  The first one was located in a High School, and the donated, salvaged or stolen equipment was held together by rubber bands and bubble gum.  No glamour, no glitz.   The second was a free standing building but oh so tiny and cramped for the number of people attempting to work there.  There were nice vehicles in the parking lot, mostly from trade-outs.  The equipment, while not as bad as the first, was still obsolete and had the familiar feel of operational uncertainty.

TUNEDEX MEMORIES comes to you from my “office”, the spare upstairs bedroom. Based on my “professional” experience, I feel right at home.  Various pieces of equipment, accumulated over 25 years or so, comprise the bulk of our “operations” center.  The station “server” is about the only new addition to the room that occupies about 80 hours of my life each week.

For legal enthusiasts, we are classified as a “hobby” station.  No commercials, no income.  I will eventually get around to adding a shameless request for contributions to offset our costs via PayPal, but I want to get the “specialty” shows running first.  I’m hoping we have many new listeners who tune in for the unique play list of tunes, and the good news is, if you like what you hear, wait until you hear what Frank, Steve, and Kenny have to offer.

With all the political hyperbole, financial doom and gloom, the sharp rise in the cost of gas and food, I must admit, I’ve taken solace in my own creation.  Even though I’ve chosen each song myself, I find myself listening to the station while I work for the escape value if nothing else.

With no assistance from my aching joints, I get through each day with a lot of help from the wonderful music of my youth.  My approach to daily stress is compounded by my OCD.

• I live and die with the Indians and wonder if I will be around long enough to see them win a World Series.
• I worry how my kids and grandsons will cope with the ever changing world around them.
• I feel a sense of helplessness as sickness and obituaries become a larger part of my life.

But then, I realize that my efforts have touched another person’s life and it’s all worthwhile.

When I get around to begging for money, this statement will become invalid, but for now, if you want to help us, please just help spread the word.  Please let your friends know that they can go back to some of the most special times of their lives, all they have to do is listen.  We have all the scenarios covered.  Love triumphs, love fails, school was great, school was horrible, dances, football games, cars, hanging out with your friends, your life will literally unfold before your eyes if you just listen to the words.

In my mind, the image of a spinning 45 represents a “circle of life” of sorts.  For a lot of us, our lives began with music.  As our turntables slow down, these tunes can allow us to  relive every moment.  Let us take you back to a time in your life when you didn’t have a care in the world…. just listen to TUNEDEX MEMORIES!

Optional URL for listening to Tunedex Memories

Our website has been down for over 12 hours. This doesn’t happen often, but our service provider has servers to keep running just like we do. If the only way you access the station is through the website, you might think the station is down, but today, we are up and running. If you want to listen and can’t get to our website, use this URL:

http://community.loudcity.com/stations/tunedex-memories

Sure sign of Spring…

There are more inches of snow on the ground than I’d like to admit, and the temperature this morning was 9 degrees… but…

As I work today, I bask in the glow of the first Spring Training game on the radio. The Indians are winning, the multitude of great young prospects are on display, and until the last strike is called, all is right with the world.

Go Tribe!