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About Hot Pipes

Please note: Only m4a format is available directly from this site, although these are being archived to Dropbox to save expensive server storage charges. The playlists and links to the archived shows will be permanently available.

The m4a format is current and offers a better compression algorithm, whereas mp3 is technically legacy as further development has ceased. (Yes, it will be around for a long time to come!) All mp3 versions have now been archived on Dropbox.

Mission Control - the Hot Pipes Studio!
Mission Control – the Hot Pipes Studio!

Shows currently produced

A bi-weekly one-hour podcast, with no music restrictions, with researched and informative commentary. This show features many rare and exclusive tracks, some from private recording sessions and public concerts. The researched and informative commentary is a little more in-depth than the half-hour shows. UPDATE in January 2022: I’m back to bi-weekly production after a period of monthly shows due to commitments at home.

The one hour podcasts are also broadcast weekly in stereo on Radio Relaxo, Toronto, Canada – www.radiorelaxo.com – on Tuesdays at 19:00 EST, repeated Fridays at 10:00 EST and Saturdays at 19:00 EST.

A weekly half-hour The Angel Radio editions were discontinued at the end of 2021. All 352 shows are available now directly on this site. Serenade Radio requested a new half-hour series of 13 weeks: broadcasts are on Thursdays at 9:30pm UK Summer Time, starting on April 6, 2023. At some point, these shows will be posted on this site, complete with playlists.


Studio work

The Hot Pipes music library currently (as of April 2023) is almost 90,000 tracks of CD-quality (16-bit, 44.1 kHz) files, of which about 60,000 are of theatre pipes; they are held on hard disk and organised in iTunes. These are from various digital and analogue sources, requiring varying degrees of processing:

a) All CDs are copied into the database, the metadata (track details) checked and corrected as required. While track names are usually available by lookup in iTunes, they are frequently inaccurate and rarely contain composer information, which must be entered separately, requiring research on the web etc.

b) LPs, reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes (when an LP is not available) must be digitised, de-clicked (sometimes persistent clicks must be removed manually) and de-noised, and then split into tracks. All of the details of those must then be manually added into the iTunes database.

I already had some 200 LPs and an unknown number of cassettes to process when, a few years ago, a huge donated collection of digital and analogue commercial recordings arrived. These, along with some very rare and unusual recordings in my possession, have helped to keep the material on the programmes fresh and interesting.

Please note that my library of recordings will eventually be donated to ‘suitable’ entities – currently planned are the American Theatre Organ Society and the Cinema Organ Society – so that the generous donations of recordings by many listeners and countless man-years of work expended on processing and cataloging will not be wasted. Negotiations are currently underway to establish a permanent archive.


Website hosting

The website and sound files in mp3 (now legacy) and m4a formats are held on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for speed of streaming and download delivery. If anyone experiences any difficulty with accessing Hot Pipes, please do contact me immediately, using the contact form on this website or directly by email. NOTE: Some older files are now hosted on Dropbox to save limited server disc space.