editing
The show this afternoon went great, if I do say so. The phone rang like crazy. I had 12 requests, and a couple of the callers didn't even make requests! (To be fair, most of the requests came over the website. Still, there were a lot of phone calls.) I prefer it this way. It's more hectic, and also more fun and energizing. I talked again to the fellow who told me the Andrews Sisters were Afro-Cuban. This time it was clear that he was joking with me and never expected me to take it seriously. I was playing Wayne Newton and he told me that Wayne Newton is really K.D. Lang. Which is pretty funny, the young Wayne Newton does kind of look like K.D. Lang. I shot back "Did you know that Louis Armstrong was Irish? I thought you should know that." Then he told me that Condi Rice is really Morgan Freeman in drag! I'm really glad he called back after that other time. Now I know he was sharing a joke with me, not having a joke at my expense.
After the show this evening, I started working on audio editing for next week's "dad divaville lounge." My clients who work in radio recommended Peak, and I want to download the demo and try it. If I can learn it well enough to use it effectively for this show, I'll buy it so I can use it for future interview shows. In the meantime I've got a much more limited audio editing program called Fission, which I bought for a few bucks because it was bundled with Audio Hijack Pro. It's working pretty well for the fundamental editing. This evening I broke the audio file into separate segments for each talkset, and then got started on editing the first segment. The main problem was that I must have had my headset turned down too low, as my voice was much quieter than my dad's. To my relief that was easy to fix. Then I trimmed out the "ums" and a few false starts on my part, things like that. Also I moved one chunk of dialogue to an earlier place where I thought it would sound better. I must admit, I felt pretty proud of myself for doing all of that. I think the first talkset is pretty much done, unless Peak turns out to be so much better at audio editing that it's worth doing over.
The one thing Fission is not able to do is multiple simultaneous tracks. I always play music under the talksets, and so of course I want to do the same with the interview. I could just do what I normally do, stick in a CD with instrumentals and hit play just before starting the dialogue on the air. But if I can tweak the music and the dialogue on the computer, I know I'll be able to make them sound better together. You know, time them out properly, occasionally pause the dialogue and bring up the music for a moment, things like that. Anyway, Fission can't do that and I'm really hoping Peak can.