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At last look, we have over 1100 participants in at least 17 countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and of course the USA. The list has been running steadily since 1994, first courtesy of io.com in Texas, and then later courtesy of America Online's "Give Back to the Net" program. They've hosted us, gratis, for over TEN years now.
Members range from Broadway Pro's to High School Kids; this is a non-elitist forum. It's also a very high signal-to-noise forum; off-topic discussions usually get quashed by the other list participants.
The list's archives are a tremendous resource, created by the list members. Posts may be browsed by month, subject, or author, or may be searched. Many list readers prefer to read the mailing list via the archives, which are updated hourly, rather than clogging up their mailboxes with posts. You must, however, be subscribed to the list and use your email software in order to post to the list.
What's a Mailing List? -- in this case it's an automated responder that takes mail you send to it and forwards it to all of the other subscribers. When someone replys to a message on the list, it also goes to the entire list of people...thus facilitating discussions (also allowing you to very quickly embarass yourself if you forget that hitting REPLY and not changing the outgoing email address means your message will go to all 1100 list subscribers and the web-based archives, where it will reside in perpetuity). The mailing list format is generally fairly high-speed (unlike Ye Olde Usenet newsgroups) and is available to users of any size system or computer platform.
The Theatre-Sound mailing list is a free resource; email service is provided by America Online, and archive space and connectivity are provided by Jim Bay. Archive software is a combination of Hypermail, HTdig, and assorted custom software written by Jim Bay in perl, tcsh, php, or whatever else happened to be lying around that day.
Send mail to listserv@listserv.aol.com with the text"subscribe theatre-sound {your name}" (without the brackets or the quotes)in the body of the message. You're encouraged to use your real, full name in your subscription, because it makes it easier for your collegues to find you & mail you. It is not, however, required.Note that you'll receive a message from listserv asking you to confirm your subscription, and giving instructions on how to do so. You'll get this once when you first sign up, and then about every 6 months on the anniversary of your subscription (unless you're a regular poster, in which case listserv assumes your address is still valid). This helps weed-out bad addresses on the list.
Send mail to listserv@listserv.aol.com with the text"signoff theatre-sound" (without the brackets or the quotes)in the body of the message. You must send this command from the address you want to unsubscribe. If you no longer have access to that address, you need to mail the listowner, Jim Bay, to be removed manually (see "contact the listowner" link above)
If you would like to receive one piece of mail from the list every day instead of a copy of each piece of mail as it's posted to the list, use the DIGEST option. This will compact all the day's posts into a single message and send it to you around midnight, Eastern Time.
Send mail to listserv@listserv.aol.com with the textset theatre-sound DIGESTin the body of the message.
If you're getting the digest version and would like to get back to single posts,
Send mail to listserv@listserv.aol.com with the textset theatre-sound NODIGESTin the body of the message.
When all else fails, use the "contact the listowner" link above and I'll help you out.
If you're new to mailing lists, please take five minutes and read the Official Listserv Users' Manual. It will help you understand the various commands and settings you can use with the listserv software.
If you need somebody's address, there are a couple of things you can do:
NOTE PLEASE that there is no longer any need for you to set your subscription options to "CONCEAL" -- nobody can see your address except me (unless you post to the list, then everyone can see it) and I will eventually go back and set it to non-concealed, because conceal just makes it harder for me to administer the list.
The Acoustical Society of America
Audio Engineering SocietyESTA - Entertainment Services and Technology Association
NAB - National Association of Broadcasters
NSCA - National Systems Contractors Association
SIA Software - the makers of Smaart software
SMPTE Society of Motion Picture & TV Engineers
SPARS - the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services
Syn Aud Con Workshops & Seminars
United States Institute for Theatre Technology
Other Sites
Martin Lukesch's Austrian info site
EAW has a lot of reference material on their site.
Search for & purchase single sound effects
Wireless Mic licensing FAQ (USA) maintained by Bill McFadden.
Charlie Richmond's reference site
Audio Technica's Online Wireless Intermod Calculator
John Leonard's pages INCLUDES SOUND SYMBOL LIBRARIES FOR MINICAD, SOME MANUALS, ETC
TAMRON CCTV lens coverage calculator...wondering what focal length lens you need from the balcony rail? try this.USA Television Frequencies:
USA Television Frequencies
USA CATV Frequencies
DTV Channel Assignments - on the FCC website
Spectrum Allocation Chart
From the U.S. Office of Spectrum Management (Department of Commerce)
Here's a direct link to the chart
SynAudCon's mailing list, while not free, is an extremely useful resource. I think it's $35/year.
Show control mailing list
Stagecraft mailing list
the DAW-MAC mailing list for ProTools etc.
The Internet Broadway Database sort of like IMDB, but for Broadway..
Robert Auld maintains the theatre-sound lists's List of Pro Audio Manufacturers with web addresses, etc.
AUDIO EQUIPMENT RENTAL & SALES COMPANIES
Solid Audio, Vienna
SISTEC - Buenos Aires
1.2.1.2.'s Directory of European Resources
Unicom - Cancun, Mexico
This page: http://www.brooklyn.com/theatre-sound/
Troubleshooting Subscription ProblemsLIST ARCHIVES ARE AVAILABLE
To access the list's archives, use this link.In order to protect the list members from robotic email address harvesters, email addresses in the archives are heavily altered to make them worthless to spammers.
Nonetheless, you are prohibited from harvesting data from the archives for any use other than personal research. Specifically, republishing posts from the list without the prior permission of the poster is prohibited. If you're a magazine writer looking to cobble together an article on theatre-sound by lifting the text of people's posts and republishing them, you're not welcome here.
Once in a while, things do go wrong.
Here are the most common problems + solutions:
listserv rejects my posts and says I'm not subscribed! But I'm getting mail from the list, so I KNOW I'm subscribed.
This one comes up often enough to be maddening.
In order to reduce (i.e. eliminate) people spamming the list with advertisements for small blue pills, etc., listserv requires you to be subscribed before it will accept your post. It checks this via the EXACT email address you used when you subscribed. Now, if your network mail system sends mail out as theatre.university.edu but your email address is set to university.edu in your email program, it will very often cause listserv to start bouncing messages.
Best fix: unsubscribe, by sending the text 'signoff theatre-sound' to listserv@listserv.aol.com, then immediately resubscribe (subscribe theatre-sound your-name-goes-here-no-dashes to listserv@listserv.aol.com). That usually does the trick.
A variation on this theme is that you may have multiple addresses from which you want to post, but of course you don't want to get multiple copies of the list's posts. To accomplish this, sign up from each address you wisth to use, then on the ones from which you do NOT wish to receive duplicate mailings, send the text "set theatre-sound nomail"
A new variation on this theme: AOL has apparently installed some new spam-blocking software on the machines that run listserv, and if your network appears to be guilty of spamming (no fault of yours), listserv may reject your postings. If this is the case, there's nothing I can do to fix it; my best suggestion is to use another email address for posting to the list. Contact me using the link below and I'll set you up with a gmail account.
My posts to the list seem to disappear!
There are several reasons why this can happen. One is if the connection between your mail system and listserv fail on the first (or second, or third...) try, your mailer will normally wait several hours before trying to send it again. Be patient.
Another reason this sometimes appears to happen is your post actually IS getting to the list, but you have anti-spam software which is intercepting the mail, so you never see it. Best thing to do is to check the current month's archives and see if the post showed up there. If it did, you know the problem's on your mail system somewhere. It is also possible for you to set listserv's subscription options so that it doesn't send your own posts back to you, but not many people manage to do this accidently.
If your post is specifically rejected by listserv (because it's too long, or because you've attached a file, or whatever), listserv will specifically tell you it's rejecting your mail.
I'm trying to unsubscribe, but I can't
To do this, you have to be using the same (exactly the same) email address you used when you subscribed. If you're stuck, send me a copy of a full message from the list (with all the headers) and I'll unsubscribe you manually (see the "contacting the listowner" link above)
I have a new email address and I need to remove the old one.
If you still have access to the old one, use the "unsubscribe" command as listed above. If you don't you need to contact me and I'll do it for you manually.
Getting in touch with the listowner
First off, let me warn you that I never, ever read the "theatre-sound-request@listserv.aol.com" address. It's completely overrun with spam (to the tune of a hundred messages per day on a bad day). Messages sent there go directly to the bit-bucket.
You can email me by using this form.
Please note that I'm a (usually) working professional in the field; if your message doesn't get a reply immediately, please be patient; I'm probably buried in production somewhere.