03 · Archive

The Weatherscan Music Archive

The complete in-house music library that played under Weatherscan — all four discs — plus Trammell Starks’ three-disc Music for Local Forecast. As far as I have ever been able to determine, I was the first person to get all of it onto YouTube in one place. These playlists are, by some distance, the most-watched thing on my channel.

Why this needed doing

Weatherscan ran a continuous local forecast loop with a music bed underneath it, and for a lot of people that music is a more vivid memory than anything else about the channel. It was never sold. It was library and production music, licensed for broadcast, scattered across discs that were never meant to leave a station.

Which means that when the channel went dark, the music went with it — surviving only as off-air recordings with a forecast talking over the top. Collecting clean copies of the actual tracks, disc by disc, took years and a lot of help from people who had pieces of it. Putting the complete set in one place seemed worth doing before the remaining copies went the way of the channel.

Ongoing work

Some of these tracks have been replaced with higher-quality transfers as better sources have turned up, and that process is not finished. If you have a cleaner copy of anything in these sets, I would like to hear from you — see the about page.

Weatherscan — the four-disc set

The in-house library, complete. Each disc is its own playlist.

Play the set here

Each embed starts at the head of its disc and continues through the playlist.

Disc One, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

Disc Two, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

Disc Three, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

Disc Four, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

Trammell Starks — Music for Local Forecast

The other half of the story. Trammell Starks composed the Local Forecast music that ran on The Weather Channel’s WeatherStar systems — the smooth-jazz and new age beds that are, for a certain generation, the actual sound of a weather forecast. Three discs, collected here in full.

Disc One, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

Disc Two, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

Disc Three, full playlist. Watch on YouTube.

On rights, plainly

None of this music is mine. It was written and recorded by working composers and licensed to a broadcaster, and it remains theirs. I collected it, transferred it, and published it because no complete copy existed anywhere else and it was disappearing.

If you are a rights holder in any of this material and would rather a track not be up, say so and it comes down — no argument. Contact details are on the about page.

“Weatherscan”, “WeatherStar” and “The Weather Channel” are trademarks of The Weather Channel. This archive is non-commercial and claims no affiliation or endorsement.

This archive is not the only place the Weatherscan habit shows up. I also build Accessible Weather Center — a free weather application with a Weatherscan-style cycling display, era-authentic themes going back to the 1988 WeatherStar 3000, and every screen spoken aloud.