ready to go

The show is ready to go! Yesterday afternoon I finished editing the audio, and then did the music selection. That's the fun part: picking out the music to go with the talksets. Both songs to play after talksets, and instrumentals to go underneath, so to speak. (I'm sure there's a radio word for that, but I have no idea what I'm doing so I don't know the word.) For instance, for a long talkset about my dad going to a coastal town and meeting American GIs who were stationed there, I picked "Sing Sing Sing" by Benny Goodman Orchestra. Which was actually recorded a couple of years before the war, but I think it conveys the tone of the talkset pretty well. Besides, I love that track and I don't normally get to play it, being an 8 1/2 minute instrumental and all. Also, in one segment my dad talks about listening to the BBC during the war, and I have a CD of wartime music from the BBC Radio Orchestra, which of course I used in that segment. Plus there were a few songs that my dad had requested, like "American Patrol" by Glenn Miller. Georg was a huge help yesterday, going through the CDs and making a list of wartime big band instrumentals that were the right length, so I could pick the ones I wanted.

I was running a bit long so I did something a little new this time: last time, if a talkset was longer than any appropriate instrumental tracks, I'd use two and just let the songs start early and run on after the talkset. But this time several of the talksets were 4-5 minutes, and using two instrumentals would have added a minute or two to each. And I just didn't have enough time to do that. So this time I figured out how to copy a chunk of the instrumental and paste it back in, lengthening the track without it sounding like anything had changed. I was surprised to find how easy that was, as long as I copied a passage with a lot of repetition. It just sounded like that bit lasted 15 seconds longer (or whatever). Someone who knew the track really well would notice the change of course, but the way I'm using them, dropped in under talksets, no one will be able to tell.

This morning I finished up, made sure everything times out right, and fixed one track that was messed up. I forgot about a bug in Audacity: when you import a music track off a CD, you have to save it right away so Audacity has the source audio in the project folder. If you start monkeying around with the music track before you save, that weirds Audacity out for some reason. Every edit on an unsaved track (dropping the volume, fading in, whatever) introduces random noise into the music track. And undoing the changes doesn't undo the noise. When it happened, I remembered it from last time. But I don't do this often enough to have remembered in advance -- or to have remembered why it was happening! I flailed around in a panic for a few minutes, even reinstalled Audacity, then stumbled onto the solution. Whew!

Now I'm burning everything onto CD. And previewing the CDs to make sure they're okay. Which may sound obsessive, but one time I went to the station with a specialty show all planned out, and a screwed up CDR. Which resulted in a lot of panic, a phone call to Georg to reburn the CD and drive it over as fast as possible, and a show that didn't turn out at all like I had wanted. Now I always check. Especially something like this where almost the whole show is on CDR.

In any case, the show is from 2-4 pm. Tune in if you can! I think it turned out well if I do say so. 88.7 fm in Durham, wxdu.org elsewhere.