Space music radio show from Philadelphia

Star's End is one of the longest running radio programs of ambient music in the world. Since 1976, Star's End has been providing the Philadelphia broadcast area with music to sleep and dream to. 

This archive of recordings of Star’s End is provided for archival and educational purposes only. When known, text file versions of the playlists are included for each given date. If you enjoy the content within, please consider supporting the artists who create this music. 

It is my opinion that the these episodes can continue to be enjoyed for many years into the future.

I first recorded Star’s End when I lived in Philadelphia in the 1980’s. When I moved out of the area, those precious few hours of tape became often listened to treasures, as I found it difficult to find other sources for this kind of music, either on the radio or in record stores. 

When I discovered that the show could be streamed, I once again looked for ways to record it. In the early days of streaming (2000-2005) the quality was often less than optimal, the software to directly capture a stream was often limited, and the process often required staying awake to restart dropped connections. 

In 2010, I discovered that the quality of the stream had greatly improved to use 128kbs mp3 and that software allowed for auto restarts and for making edits without adding loss. From that point on, I have recorded the program most weeks and it is these recordings which make up the bulk of this archive.

In 2018, WXPN began including episodes of Star's End in their streaming archive of recent shows. For some reason, the encoding rate for the archives is 192kbs mp3, which is an improvement over the station's live stream. For the sake of completeness, I have begun to include these archived files in this collection, which will mean that many dates will have more than one recording. For the station's archive files, I do no editing at all, these files are as they were posted by the station. For my own recordings from the live stream, I typically trim the ends and normalize the volume level using mp3directcut (which does not re-encode the audio). Both should provide a good listening experience.

WXPN streamed only in Windows Media Audio format during the years 2003-2005. These files cannot be natively played back on the Internet Archive's pages. The file that plays back is a derived mp3 format file. This has been re-encoded from the WMA file so it has gone through two layers of lossy compression, and likely suffers from artifacts and quality issues. I have included it for convenience. If you wish to have the highest quality recording of this show, it is suggested to download the original WMA files and play them back with a supported media player such as VLC Media Player.

I would very much be interested in filling in missing dates. If you have recordings that you would be willing to share, I would welcome adding them to this collection. Please get in touch, tonymasiello *at* yahoo!

The ‘cover’ images used for each episode are taken from images that are public domain or share/modify creative commons licenses. Images have been edited for uniformity. An attempt has been made to have a theme for each year and to choose images that reflect upon the nature of the music within.

Collection page - Star’s End 40th anniversery logo.

2003 - Public domain images from the Flickr group Geometric Beauty

2010 - Images from the starsend.org website.

2011 - Various astronomical images taken from NASA collections on the Internet Archive

2012 - Images from the NASA Juno mission to Jupiter.

2013 - Images created by Francesco de Comité (from his Flickr acct, user fdecomite)

2014 - Images for the Internet Archive collection of the Cleveland Musuem of Art

2015 - Public Domain images from Flickr with the keyword 'texture'

2016 - Images of the moons of Jupiter from NASA missions.

2017 - Public domain images of fractals

2018 - Public Domain images from Flickr user parameter_bond