Extreme Volume Pop Halloween

One of the places I searched for music to play from our porch for trick-or-treaters was the Internet Archive site at archive.org. The site provides permanent storage for collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books, all of which are freely available to the public. If you ever attempt to follow a link on a webpage only to find it is no longer working, you may be able to find an archived version of the page through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; simply put the URL into the search field for the Wayback Machine, which will show you all of the times the page was archived in the past.

You can search the Internet Archive site for "Halloween" and get lots of results, if you are looking for free public domain music that you could use for Halloween. I found Extreme Volume Pop Halloween, which is 46 minutes and 7 seconds of instrumental music described by its creator Tom Baker as:

An album of eclectic , haunting music, inspired by the greatest holiday in the history of the world. Dark ambient passages, beautiful keyboard compositions, and occult music to give you many nights of uneasy dreams are what this free recording are all about! For fans of dark music, gothic orchestrations, horror movie soundtracks.

The titles for the songs it includes are as follows:

• The Inner Sanctum
• Lurking Fear
• Halloween Overture 2008
• Mind of a Killer
• Gypsy Caravan
• The Stalker
• Witchcraft Through the Ages
• Midnight Shadows
• Vlad the Impaler
• Galactic Carnivore
• Here There Be Ghosts
• Sabbat

You can download a zip file, Halloween_928, which contains one MP3 file of all the songs or you can listen to the music online.

At his website, Tom Baker describes himself thusly:

an experimental musician dabbling in forms as diverse as metal, punk, noise, ambient, drone, industrial, and aleatoric. He has been featured on a number of different internet radio programs, including The Black Cat Lounge, Stirring the Cauldron with Marla Brooks, and Seps Paranormal Radio. He has written a number of novels, and covered nonfiction topics as diverse as true crime, UFOs, urban legends, ghosts and hauntings, and other paranormal events.

A list of books he has written is available here. Scary Urban Legends (illustrated by John C. Eng), Haunted Indianapolis and Other Indiana Ghost Stories (with Jonathan Titchenal), and Indiana Ghost Folklore might also be interesting Halloween reading.

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Halloween Music Stations at Live365

Like Pandora, Live365 also provides Halloween radio stations. Live365 is an Internet radio broadcasting and listening network where people can create their own online radio stations or listen to thousands of stations created by other people from around the world. You can listen to over 7,000 stations across 265 genres of music.

For a list of the Halloween stations provided by Live365, you can go to Listen to Free Halloween Music Online - Live365 Internet Radio.

One of the stations is Musique Macabre, which is "Horror & Halloween Radio." The station plays oldies, novelty, horror movie soundtracks, horror punk, surf, psychobilly, deathrock, gothic, space, library, symphonic, progressive rock, electronic, soundscapes, rare and weird" music. The website for the station is at Musique Macabre Horror & Halloween Radio.

Other stations include the following:

• Holidaze Halloween
• The Haunted Mansion!
• Halloween Radio: KDOA!!
• Horror Old Time Radio
• The Grimly Show
• Bindlegrim Halloween
• Drive In of the Damned
• Boogeyman Radio
• WGTR Hallotober
• Halloween Party Music
• Monster Kid Radio
• Welcome To Weirdsville
• All the World's a Stage
• Kiddfellas Radio

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Halloween Music from Pandora

My wife and I decorate the house for Halloween, both inside and out, so I thought I'd also put up some Halloween decorations here, also. For others who may also like to listen to music that fits with Halloween, Pandora Internet Radio, aka "Pandora Radio" or just "Pandora", offers several Halloween-themed stations at this time of the year. Pandora is the "custodian" for the Music Genome Project, which associates a list of attributes with songs as one might associate genes with phenotypical traits of an organism.

Halloween Party Radio plays songs such as Monster Mash by John Zacherle, while the Spooky Symphonies station plays music from films, such as The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Family Halloween Radio provides Halloween music for children of all ages, which one could use for a children's Halloween party or can play from the porch as we do for trick-or-treaters. The station plays songs such as The Purple People Eater by Shep Wooley. There's also Ghostly Grooves, which plays songs such as When I'm Small by Phantogram.

You can point your browser to any of the stations and listen for free to songs appropriate for the holiday.

Note: Pandora's Terms of Use states "Pandora can only be used in the United States, New Zealand, Australia and those countries' respective territories."

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List of Number-One Hits

If you want to know what song was number one in the U.S. on a particular day, such as the day you were born, check List of number-one hits (United States) on Wikipedia.

Note: for dates from 1940 up through 1957, you can view a list of number-one songs in the United States during the year according to Billboard magazine. Prior to the creation of the Hot 100, Billboard published multiple singles charts each week. In 1957, the following four charts were produced:

• Best Sellers in Stores - ranked the biggest selling singles in retail stores, as reported by merchants surveyed throughout the country.
• Most Played by Jockeys - ranked the most played songs on United States radio stations, as reported by radio disc jockeys and radio stations.
• Most Played in Jukeboxes - ranked the most played songs in jukeboxes across the United States (this chart was discontinued in June 1957).
• Top 100 - an early version of the Hot 100, the first chart to feature a combined tabulation of sales, airplay and jukebox play.

NOTE: Billboard changed its issue dates from a Saturday to a Monday schedule on April 29, thus causing a one-week inconsistency.

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Abacast Software Plays Music from Wrong Radio Station

A user reported a problem when switching from one on-line radio station to another. Both stations relied on Abacast streaming media software. I found that terminating the abaclient.exe process or choosing "exit" from the Abacast Client icon in the system tray would allow me to switch to ther other station and hear its music rather than the first station's music.

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Abacast Streaming Software

A user reported a problem when switching from one on-line radio station to another. She had downloaded Abacast software from a link on one station's site. I couldn't duplicate the problem initially, but did find that a separate download is needed to use the service with Firefox versus Internet Explorer.

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