Golden Age Radio FTP Server Sites

---

With the proliferation of thousands of FTP, Podcast, and other 'me-too' sites on the Internet, I can no longer recommend any but the following three FTP providers and these only because I'm first-person familiar with their motivations and operation. As more Preservation-motivated FTP sites arise, I'll attempt to include more choices in the future. It's unfortunate that Golden Age Radio Preservation has been supplanted by thousands of low quality, utterly commercialized 'OTR' sites and groups--so much so, that the initials 'OTR' have come to represent the lowest common denominator of the Radio Collecting community as well as a reckless disregard for Golden Age Radio preservation. Since I can't in good conscience recommend any 'OTR' site but the ones cited below, I leave it to you to find such sites on your own. Click on the 'Transcriptions' button at the right for more quality choices. I can only suggest that if you truly love, respect, and honor the Golden Age of Radio, that you seek out and support only those sites and providers who genuinely promote Golden Age Radio Preservation. The one recurring theme I'd leave with you is to absolutely stay away from any site offering Audio Books or extravagant numbers of available episodes. Simply put, they're scam artists, charlatans, and the absolute bottom-feeders of the Golden Age preservation hobby.

There's a right way and a wrong way to operate an FTP service. Scam artists like OTRFtp.com, OTRDays.com, OTRCat.com and SpartaOTR.com represent everything wrong with this wonderful hobby.

OTRCat.com, via its OTRDays.com surrogate has, for the last 2 years subtly embedded an 'http://www.digitaldeliftp-sucks.com' link with an 'HREF' command at the colon after the word 'Google' on its OTRDays.com index page. The effect of this, given the number of affiliates he's acquired over the past two years, was to have Google crawl that defamatory embedded code thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of times over the past two years, littering Google's repository with thousands of negative references to our digitaldeliftp.com web crawls, queries, and link recommendations. This is the same OTRCat.com that was embedding hundreds of Amazon.com links in the source code behind hundreds of WikiPedia OTR Articles. Why? Well it's obvious if one has no scruples whatsoever. Every time an unsuspecting WikiPedia visitor clicked one of those 'informational' links it took them to Amazon.com with OTRCat.com's Amazon Vendor Account code embedded in the link to as to get credit for it from Amazon.com's Vendor referral system. Now here's a screen shot of the OTRDays.com screen that defamed us:



Here's [was--it's flushed out now] a link to OTRDay's Google Cache (for a few more days, anyway). Hover over the colon yourself. And here's irrefutable proof from that same cached OTRDays source code:



So this is Mr. OTRCat/OTRDays, OTRFtp at his 'OTR' finest. Ruthless, utterly immoral, deceitful, cowardly, and reprehensible. At once exemplifying everything that's gone wrong with the worst of the 'OTR/OTR Wikipedia Community' . But it gets better . . .

Now we move on to Mr. SpartaOTR.com, yet another scurrilous, cheating, deceptive and thoroughly unscrupulous 'OTR' site operator. This is the same SpartaOTR.com that erected the digitaldeliftp-sucks.com domain with OTRCat and Randy's OTR over two years ago. By way of background, the domain site, widely disseminated throughout the Yahoo Group, OTRR Group, and OTR Wikipedia communities for about five days, offered some 15 or so, scandalous, utterly unattributed, negative allegations against The Digital Deli Online, topped by a turbaned Saddam Hussein image with a penis for the head. After repeated cease and desist warnings, SpartaOTR and OTRCat 'parked' the digitaldeliftp-sucks.com domain for the past two years. My Dad had just died, and I had my hands full at the time or I'd have responded more aggressively. As it was, as soon as the domain expired we bought that domain and all of it's derivatives and have them parked. Indeed it was only when I apprised OTRCat/OTRDays that I was onto his embedded code defamation, and put him on notice through his OTRDays.com message system, that he apparently checked to see that I'd purchased the domain he'd parked two years ago. He removed the defamatory embedded code within hours of citing him for it.

Mind you, this was all in response to an attempt to clean up all the commercial links emanating from OTRCat, LibSyn, otrsite.com, and SpartaOTR on WikiPedia's OTR Articles pages. Ergo, their libelous and defamatory, 'whispering campaign' 'swift-boating' retaliation for uncovering their deceit on WikiPedia and other forums. And of course that same meme went out over all the OTR Forums, OTR Chat Rooms, and OTR IRC sites throughout the OTR Community. Then we come to this bit of absurdity from SpartaOTR:


(Click Above to Pop-up the full page, or Right-click to download the page)

What is it? To the naive observer it's a list of five 'awards' 'issued' by something called WebSiteInternetAwards.com. Have you ever heard of it? No, I thought not. Neither had we. It turns out that SpartaOTR.com erected this bogus award page to further defame and libel The Digital Deli Online by both misrepresenting the status of our site as well as lying about it's availability during the months of February and March 2007, which by the way had an uptime of 99.94 percent for the entire two month period. Indeed it was two of the most successful months online of our 6 year history.

Note from the 'awards' page that he's apparently abetted by Randy Davis's Randy's OTR, Richard Mann's 'The Listening Room' at oldtimeradioprograms.com and OTRCat's OTRFtp.com (yet another of the 43 domains OTRCat owns to deceive unwary subscribers into believing he's just a good ole boy running the cute little OTRCat.com website all by his lonesome) in his wire fraud.

If it isn't immediately obvious who wrote all five of the 'award citations' you need but visit any of SpartaOTR's literacy-challenged pages to satisfy yourself as to who the writer is. But apparently that isn't enough for Mr. SpartaOTR.com. In his latest assaults on logic, he's bought up all the derivations of both our website, digitaldeliftp.com and otrr.org, otherwise known as The Old Time Radio Researcher's Group, the self-anointed worldwide certification 'authority' for all Golden Age Radio Show sets. You can see that here:


(Click Above to Pop-up the full page, or Right-click to download the page)

And here:


(Click Above to Pop-up the full page, or Right-click to download the page)

Now apart from the absurdity he alleges in the first screen--that one is to believe that the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group is the 'wannabe' and SpartaOTR.com is the 'owner' of the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group name and domains. While I'm not entirely enchanted with the way the Old Time Researcher's Group goes about it's business of self-inflation and inaccurate 'research', I'll be the first one to defend their right to expect that they won't be so blatantly defamed, libeled or have their considerable reputation for the good they actually do, be sullied by this SpartaOTR.com nonsense.

But let's delve a bit further into SpartaOTR.com's special brand of naked deceit, deception, and outright plagiarism:

On his 'sockpuppet' OTRDepot.com site he cites 'over 300,000+ 'Radio Shows' in .mp3 format', yet on his main 'My Other Websites' at SpartaOTR.com itself, he cites 'over 500,000+ Radio Shows in .mp3 format'. Now granted, they're both naked lies, in the first place. We've downloaded his 'offerings' surreptitiously and of the actual 287,000+ 'files' on his FTP Site, well over 64 percent of them are copyright protected Audio Books going back no earlier than 2002. So that dispenses with the first 183,000 of his alleged '300,000+ or 500,000+ 'Radio Shows' in his collection (one wonders why he doesn't just say a 'bazilion' or 'gazillion', as apparently his loyal subscribers are too gullible to perceive the absurdity of his claims, in any case). Another 23 percent of his 'radio shows' or 60,000+, are current, coast-to-coast-am radio talk show recordings he's acquired from newsgroups over the past three years, apparently. That leaves only 40,000 potential, possible, actual Golden Age radio shows, in his collection. And of that remaining 40,000 'radio shows', well over 7,000 of them are contemporary BBC and CBC recordings of the past 15 years. So that leaves approximately 33,000 actual old time radio episodes in his 'collection'.

Moving on, he cites 1,300 radio images he makes available to his subscribers, but what he fails to mention is that he sucked down all of them from Radiola Guy and other such Antique Radio Collector sites, without attribution.

Going further, he cites over 1,500 cover art images, none of which he ever generated himself, and all of which he obtained from Yahoo Groups, OTRNow, or Roger Hohenbrink's art from the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group, again passing them off as SpartaOTR's own work.

Then he cites over 6,000 transcription labels, that I know for a fact that he downloaded from both First Generation Radio Archives and myself, back when he was building his collection from our own Digital Deli FTP Site. Again not his own scans, and not his own sources, and clearly not attributed.

He even cites over 1,000+ newspaper and magazine ads from the Golden Age of Radio, again, simply downloaded from a well-known newspaper and magazine ad site that caters to ephemera collectors. I know, quite well where he acquired Them because I use them as a source myself, for all the various facsimile and reproduction radio ads, transcription label art, and cover art I generate for The Digital Deli Online. But again, no attribution is given or credited on his websites.

And to cap it all off, he steals virtually all of David Goldin's marvelous RadioGoldIndex pages of meticulously archived radio transcription logs, passing them off as his 'log database' for SpartaOTR.com.

Now I could go on ad nauseam, but what would be the point? SpartaOTR.com controls some 30 or so domains, several of which deal with 'OTR. OTRCat.com controls at least 43 domains, all of which he'd have Google, Yahoo, MSN, and The DMOZ believe are all competing OTR websites, when, in actuality they're all the same person and organization. And yet somehow he's persuaded the co-opted editors at The DMOZ that he's both a Radio History site and an Old Time Radio site, and all of the OTR sites he controls, interlinking with each other, link-back and forth between each other, and--so far, anyway--have escaped the scrutiny of either the search engines, or the WebRing's he's deceived into believing his various OTR websites are all independent entities. What it does do is beg the question: why go after this two-person, Digital Deli Online website. Now granted, we've grown from an initial five pages, to well over 5,600 pages now, what with galleries, cover art, CD-Labels, show listings, etc., but are we somehow perceived as a threat to OTRCat's multi-thousand dollar monthly operations on the Internet?? Can the little Digital Deli Online with no advertisers, no sponsors, no Google Ad-Sense, or Google Ad-Words, possibly be a threat to OTRCat, SpartaOTR, Randy's OTR, WikiPedia OTR, LOFCOM.com, Old Time Radio Researcher's Group, or any of the other sites who perceive us a competing voice or choice to them??

Competition for what? Advertising Income? Ain't any. Link placement on Search Engines? We don't pay for any. Ad-Sense or Ad-Words traffic or per-click income? We ain't got any. Market share? That's laughable, we definitely ain't got any of that. So what's the motivation here? Simple venality? Thriving on hurting others that are no threat in any case? Or perhaps it's simply that, from our first six months on the internet, we ended up on the first page of any Google Search for Golden Age Radio, the first page of Yahoo for any search for Golden Age Radio, and the first pages of both MSN and Alexa, for either Golden Age Radio or Old Time Radio. Alexa is the most pathetic example of all. We've literally begged them to remove us from their Old Time Radio category, going back almost 4 years now, and they still list us in the top five Old Time Radio websites on the Internet? Now really, how pathetic is that? But is that what gripes these people so much? Success based nothing other than on Google's Web Crawls, devoid of paying Google for placement, generating distracting, annoying AdSense or AdWords nonsense all over our 5,600 pages? Or for that matter, annoying, distracting banner ads, or pop-ups all over our pages? What do any of those have to do with preserving and enjoying Golden Age Radio? Nothing. Exactly!

		Richard Mann's 'The Listening Room' at The Antique Radio Collector's Library of Old Time Radio Programs 9Richard Mann's site is the Grand-Daddy of all FTP-Access Golden Age Radio download sites. Your patronage will be well rewarded.
		The Digital Deli Online's own Golden Age Radio Collection via FTP is one of the largest and most extensive collectios of Golden Age Radio Series and Episodes on the Internet. The Collection contains 192,000+ individual files, 8700+ Series (with 'exras' for each series in most folders), over 2275 ephemeral films, 2200+ scripts, and folders. The bandwidth and accesss is among the highest on the Internet and there is no minimum Gigabyte requirement for obtaining additional download credits.
Golden Age Radio Special Interest Sites
		The Cobalt Club "A refined and genteel haven for ladies and gentlemen of breeding who crave a relaxing evening with classic radio serials" Doc Savage The Shadow The Avenger The Green Hornet Rocky Fortune Sam Spade The Saint Nero Wolfe Bold Venture
		American RadioWorks "AMERICAN RADIOWORKS® is the national documentary unit of Minnesota Public Radio. ARW is public radio's largest documentary production unit; it creates documentaries, series projects, and investigative reports for the public radio system and the Internet. ARW is based at Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul with staff journalists in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, C.A., and Durham, N.C."
		Bryan Wright's 78 RPM Listening Booth
Non-Golden Age Radio FTP Download Sites
		Frank's Vinyl Musem Frank LaRosa's collection of wierd and interesting (some Golden Age) MP3 recordings.