the new (or maybe it's the "old") WMEZ Pensacola

This is the new online station based on WMEZ "EZ 94" in Pensacola, complete with original station IDs and liners intact.

http://www.wmezdb.com

Interesting to listen to. I think the easy listening was before my time. I don't recall exactly when my parents first started visiting the beach (first in Pensacola, later Gulf Shores), but I think it was the late 80s to early 90s, when I was still in school. My earliest recollection of WMEZ was the soft vocal AC type format they had probably in the mid-90s, when their processing was best described as "nonexistent". I always remember it being the quietest station on the dial, but it sounded clean, clear and "real" versus the pumped up loudness-addled competition.

Edit to add: I added a link to EZ 94 (and Lite 99) to their respective history pages on my site, since I already had WQEZ-DB linked on the Magic 96 history page.

Thanks for the station adds/links on ABMP. It is greatly appreciated!

I used to listen to WMEZ quite a bit as a teenager when we would visit Gulf Shores...back then they were still airing "beautiful music". Since Dad lived in Gulf Shores at one time, we always went there every year for vacation. The original WMEZ-FM airchecks and liners were recorded by me during the mid 80's. I was around 17, 18 years old at the time, as best as I can remember. A couple friends of mine and I are jointly doing the new online version of WMEZ so I gave one of them the original FM station liners to "clean up", which came out pretty good, I thought, given the recordings were made on an old boombox.

They did a good job on the cleanup if they came from a boombox. I listened to a little earlier and the liners sounded pretty good for their age.

Is there a way to change the bitrate of the stream on the user's end, by chance? When I was streaming it, it wasn't very high fidelity. I dunno if that's on purpose for costs or maybe I just got a bad connection.

I toured WMEZ in 1998 when it was soft AC. They had 30 Pioneer CD magazine changers (In a rack). A operator wouild stop the players to play commercials. When it was sold, they transfered the format to WBSR) Mr. Brewer kept the AM ( I think it was a simulcast at the time anyway). They used very little processing (they used TM century discs) so the levels were constant. The building was a flashback to the 60's.

tomservo said:

They did a good job on the cleanup if they came from a boombox. I listened to a little earlier and the liners sounded pretty good for their age.

Is there a way to change the bitrate of the stream on the user's end, by chance? When I was streaming it, it wasn't very high fidelity. I dunno if that's on purpose for costs or maybe I just got a bad connection.

Click to expand...

Not sure about changing the bitrate on the user end, although we're using 128k MP3 format, which is pretty much standards nowadays. Some of the music isn't the best of quality...transferred from LPs, but working on replacing/adding music. We just moved servers a few days ago, still at 128k bitrate. The other two guys who've been partnering with me to do the station have since left the project, so I am taking care of the station temporarily until I find someone in Pensacola (preferably) who would be willing to operate the station on a permanent basis. I added a couple of short URLs for the new station. http://wmez.tk takes you directly to the station landing page on Radionomy for listening within the browser, and http://wmezdb.tk takes you directly to the m3u file to listen on your favorite media player. We've also added the station to TuneIn for mobile listening. The main station website remains at http://wmezdb.com.

btw, Our WMEZ-DB counterpart on the AL coast, WLPR-DB, is temporarily offline, but my friend who was doing WLPR-DB has found someone in Mobile who is rebuilding the station "from scratch" and expects it to be up and running again soon.

WMEZ-DB has been moved to a new server. The following URL is now effective:

Website/Listen in Browser: http://wmez.tk

WLPR-DB in Mobile will not be returning.

I came across this recreation of WMEZ recently on Tune in. It sounds exactly the way I remember it from family vacations in the late '70s and '80s. Great job of bringing it back and much appreciated. I think the audio is pretty decent...especially considering the decades that have passed since some of these recordings were created. I can hear quite a bit of hiss on some tracks, but most of them sound ok. At home I play streaming audio (mostly i-tunes and Spotify) on a 13-year old Dell laptop using a Digital Power Station audio enhancer, broadcast through a Whole House FM modulator. The result through my home stereo and a couple of other radios and boombox is actually quite good. There are definitely other streams that sound better, but the WMEZ stream through the equipment I use is still very good quality.

Here's wishing you all the best with this and the other ventures.

Thanks for the comments, cyberdad! I sent you a PM through Radio-Discussions.com.