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We currently have over 500 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 hosted us, gratis, for over 12 years. In June of 2008, the list was moved to Google Groups, to insure long-term stability of the resource.
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 are discouraged.
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.
To Join The List:
Visit this Google Groups page to change your settings.
First of all, you do not have to join the list if you just want to read it, it is open (via the webpage above) to anyone who wants to read it. However if you want to post to the list and/or receive the list via email, you will need to join.
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 Google Groups asking you to confirm your subscription, and giving instructions on how to do so. You'll get this once when you first sign up.
To Leave The List:
Visit this Google Groups page to change your settings.
You can also unsubscribe by sending an email (it can be blank) to the address
theatre-sound-list+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
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. Visit this Google Groups page to change your settings.
If you're getting the digest version and would like to get back to single posts, Visit this Google Groups page to change your settings.
When all else fails, use the "contact the listowner" link above and I'll help you out.
The List of Subscribers is not made available to the public, in order to keep down the incidence of spammers grabbing it and adding us to their pile.If you need somebody's address, there are a couple of things you can do:
- you can search the ARCHIVES to see if they've posted something, and get their address that way (this is rendered slightly less effective now that the addresses in the archive are obfuscated, but if you see "johnk12 at mac." the address is probably johnk12@mac.com),
- or you can contact me to look it up. I prefer you do 1) but would prefer you do 2) rather than post something to the list that says "JOE BLOW IF YOU'RE OUT THERE PLEASE MAIL ME" -- there's no need to send mail to 600+ people just to get one address.
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.
General References
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
Other Internet Audio & Theatrical Resources
Mailing ListsSynAudCon'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..PRO AUDIO MANUFACTURERS
Robert Auld maintains the theatre-sound lists's List of Pro Audio Manufacturers with web addresses, etc.
AUDIO EQUIPMENT RENTAL & SALES COMPANIES
Due to changes in businesses, corporate consolidations, etc., I am no longer linking to rental companies
on this page. For the most up-to-date information on companies in the US or
around the world, please post a message to the list stating where you need service.
That's the best way to get the most current info.
This page: http://www.brooklyn.com/theatre-sound/
Troubleshooting Subscription ProblemsLIST ARCHIVES ARE AVAILABLE
To access the list's archives, use this link. Please note that messages posted after the move to Google Groups are not archived via that link, you will need to go to google groups and search there.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:
· My first post to the list (after I just signed up) didn't appear!
As a defense against spammers, the first post or two from new subscribers may be automatically
held for review by a human. Be patient, it will go through eventually. If you are posting an
emergency request for help and it's your first post, use the "contact the listowner" link on google groups
to get somebody's attention and get your query posted more quickly.
· The group 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., google groups require 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 google groups to start bouncing messages.
Best fix: unsubscribe, ( Visit this Google Groups page to change your settings.) then resubscribe. 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"
· 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 group 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 the groups 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 the group (because it's too long, or because you've attached a file, or whatever), the software 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
You can email me by using this link
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.