funnystrange.com

My two interview shows about WWII are online as podcasts!
Click here for the 25 May 2008 interview with Derick Ovenall.
Click here for the 1 June 2008 interview with Giuseppe Bucca.

Or you can go to the iTunes Music Store and search for "derick ovenall", "giuseppe bucca" or "divavillelounge". (is that not cool!) Note: these podcasts include only the interview portion of the program, no music. Due to licensing issues, WXDU cannot podcast programs containing copyrighted music.

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.

This afternoon my dad and I recorded an interview for Divaville Lounge. He talked about when he first got interested in swing music and hot jazz, told stories about great concerts he saw back in the day, and introduced some of his favorite songs. I think it went well! I tried to strike the right note between maintaining a conversational tone, and letting Dad talk without interruption. He had notes to read from so that he wouldn't get stuck, and I think he did a good job of not sounding like he was reading a script.

The technical side worked out well. I didn't want to do the interview live because I thought it would just be too much stress. And I didn't know how much time the interview was going to take & wanted the ability to edit it if necessary. Most importantly, I have no idea if the instructions on how to patch in a phone call even work. (In fact, just a few days ago another dj reported that it doesn't work. Thank goodness I had already decided not to do that way!)

Instead my dad got set up on Skype, and we talked over our computers. The sound quality was much better than using a phone. I used Audio Hijack Pro to record the conversation. It's a terrific program which can be set to only record audio from a specific program, not any other source. Which was great because I didn't have to worry about accidently making my computer beep and that getting into the audio file. I used the highest quality setting for the recording, and the resulting file, for 45 minutes of audio, was 500 Mb!

At first it was strange, to be sitting at my computer reading PSAs and saying "You're listening to WXDU Durham" as if I was on the air. I joked to my dad that I needed to close my eyes and pretend I was standing in front of the board talking into the big mic. Still, I got used to it pretty quickly, and I think we both sounded comfortable. I have no experience with looking at printed dialogue and figuring out how long it will take when spoken, so I had no idea how we were going to do on time. As it turns out, we were pretty close to my goal. I'm going to time it out and make sure we have enough time to play all the songs we talked about. I'm hoping I won't have to cut anything.

I'm going to edit the interview over the next week, break it into tracks and put them on a CD. The show will air next Sunday, September 23. I hope everyone will tune in for my dad's on-air debut!

The massive indexing project is done! Whew, finally. There weren't as many loose albums left to add as I had thought a couple of days ago; mostly the time was in checking them all.

I think I am going to go ahead and write a simple web app to search the database online. The flat files have worked great, but this last big push has increased the flat file size to the point where it's hard to load the pages. (1.6 Mb each, to be precise.) It won't take long to write a simple search function, and then it will group the results better than the flat file could do.

Of course I'll still have to add new material as I buy it. Which I'm trying not to go nuts with, but to be honest I have been buying at least 1 new CD a week. My latest acquisition is ¡Sabroso! by Mongo Santamaria. He's more of a jazzman than a Divaville Lounge kind of guy, for instance he wrote "Afro Blue" and had a big hit with "Watermelon Man." But you know, it's from the right era, and I try not to be super rigid about defining the show, and I had heard a couple of excellent songs from ¡Sabroso! on that Internet radio station I like.

The CD only arrived last night and I haven't had a chance to listen to the whole thing yet. (I'm alone in the office this afternoon, and I wish I had thought to put it on my iPod!) What I've heard so far is fantastic. My rule of thumb is not to buy an album for just one song, no matter how good it is, if I haven't heard the rest. That's just too much of a risk -- if the rest of the album stinks, you could end up spending $15 or more for just one song. But 2 songs, if they're this good, and I've been humming them for weeks, and the album only costs $8? That's a bargain.

The two amazing songs, by the way, are "Que Maravilloso" and "Mambo de Cuco." Sylvia told me that "Mambo de Cuco" was probably named in honor of someone, likely one of the performers. The liner notes don't list anyone named Cuco. Maybe it's a nickname.

I think the show went well! The playlist is here in case anyone is interested.

It was a little shambolic behind the scenes, though Georg told me he couldn't tell by listening. I had a couple of flubs, the worst being I read the same PSA twice, and realized it in the middle of the second read-through. I probably should have just kept going, instead of stopping and saying "Wait, I've already read this one!" I would say I'll know better next time, but here's hoping there is no next time for that one.

It was great having Santa Salsera sit in on the show. She brought a good perspective to the theme, not to mention her incredible music collection, & had some really interesting things to say about the artists we played. I really hope we can do another Latin theme show like this in the future.

ETA: I forgot to mention the one annoying thing that happened: a long-time regular listener called, told me he was going to have to "educate" me, and tried to convince me, tried to get me to say on the air, that the Andrews Sisters were of Afro-Cuban descent. Excuse me, Afro-Cuban? I've seen their picture. At least try for something remotely plausible. But I guess tricking a dj into saying something stupid on the air seems funny, and I guess the more outrageous the dubious factoid, the funnier the prank. I'm just glad we have access to Google in the control room.

Note to self: from now on, check all information provided by listeners before repeating it on the air. Well, the Birthday Man (who writes in every week to let us know who had a birthday) seems knowledgeable and not mean enough to trick me. Everyone else, I will fact check.

(Santa Salsera and I did Google the Andrews Sisters and they are half Greek, half Norweigian.)

It's been a busy weekend, much more socializing than I'm used to. Yesterday I had lunch with Santa Salsera so we could chat about the Latin a la Lounge show. She has an amazing collection of LPs and she played a few choice examples for me. It was kind of funny how we value different things in midcentury music. For instance when she pulled out an album, made a face and said something to the effect that, this isn't any good, you won't be interested in this, only to have me exclaim with delight, "The Harmonicats? I love the Harmonicats!" The other example was Enoch Light and the Light Brigade's album of all cha chas, which she called it "unlistenable." Now I have to concede, I haven't actually heard the album and it might indeed be unlistenable. But the very idea of Enoch Light doing an all cha-cha album, to me that sounds like it just has to be good.

After lunch I drove out to Raleigh to see an old friend of mine who I haven't seen in ages. We had a very mellow afternoon. She brought her dog, an adorable Bichon named Tank, and we sat and hung out at an outdoor cafe downtown. Then we went to a neat little Italian market named Conti's, where I spent far too much money. The owner was really nice. He not only let my friend bring her dog inside, he even gave Tank a biscuit.

In just a few minutes we're going out to have dim sum with D. and S. Who are good at finding great restaurants, so I'm really looking forward to this. Then at 3 it's the Latin a la Lounge show, and we'll probably have dinner with Santa Salsera afterwards. I can't remember the last time I did so many social things in two days. Which is great, I'm not complaining! I just feel like I need a weekend to recover from my weekend.

August 16 movie: Roots of Rhythm. I confess this was a bit disappointing to me. It's a three part documentary narrated by Harry Belafonte about the history of Latin music. Actually it's about the history of Cuban music, but Belafonte consistently conflates the two. Which was the first problem for me. I want to learn about Cuban music, and I also want to learn about Brazilian music and Argentinian music and Mexican music. By talking about "Latin music" but only ever showing that of Cuba, this movie sort of implied that the others don't exist. I think the only non-Cuban musician they showed in the entire series was Carmen Miranda. She was given about a half-minute of one of her more ridiculous Hollywood numbers, and then dismissed as inauthentic.

My second problem was not really a problem with the movie in itself, more with my expectations. Because the reason why I rented the movie was research for the Latin a la Lounge show this weekend. Unfortunately, only the third part of the documentary was about Cuban music in the US. The first two parts were about the Spanish and African origins of Cuban music, and the history of music within Cuba.

There was about 45 minutes to cover 50 years of Cuban music in the US. Which is a big, big topic. There just wasn't time to go into any kind of detail. For instance, Mongo Santamaria is mentioned, but just in a list of musicians who are named once. Perez Prado was never even named. So, I didn't really learn anything.

Well no, that's not true. I learned about Anacaona, an all-female orchestra of 10 sisters who toured the US and Europe in the 30s. I learned that Desi Arnaz's father was the mayor of Santiago during the Machado regime, and that Arnaz introduced the conga to the US. I learned that Chano Pozo deserved co-songwriting credit for "Manteca" (whether he received it or not was unclear.)

Which is not to say this was a bad documentary. The first two parts created a wonderfully vivid portrait of a culture steeped in music. I probably would enjoy it more if I watched it another time, when I wasn't after specific information.

Many thanks to Lisa and Kevin for yesterday's excellent suggestion about flat files. It worked great! I just exported the db as a monstrous huge html table. Two actually, one sorted by song title and one by artist. Uploaded them both to my web server and loaded them up on the computer in the MCR at the beginning of the show. Once the pages were loaded, searching them was easy. The results weren't grouped as nicely as they would have been with a web app, but the search was fast enough that it didn't matter.

And thank goodness the suggestion came in time for yesterday's show. Searching the flat files let me fill a couple of requests that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. (Who knew I have two songs by Eddie Fisher?) The show went really well, if I do say so. Lots of requests, which keeps it fun. And I even got a nice email after the show from a listener, wow! I'm starting to feel more comfortable with the show & better able to handle the pace. I find Divaville Lounge more hectic than a regular playlist show because the songs are all so short. In a normal show, if you get behind you can always put on an eight minute song and get caught up. But in this format, almost all the songs are 2 1/2 minutes, and there are no really long songs. So you're always in a hurry to get the next song cued up. Still, I'm feeling much less harried as I get used to the pace.

Next week is a show I'm really looking forward to: Latin a la Lounge, a special theme show of Latin music. Over the weekend I made a list of potential music for the show. I have enough for about 5 shows, not even counting whatever cohost Santa Salsera will bring. Why not, it's good to have options!

If there was ever any doubt in my mind about my lack of time management skills and general insanity, it's gone now. Because, now that the massive archiving project is over and all my CDs are nicely organized and labeled in their binders, I've decided that I simply must start another humongous music-related project. This time it's a database of all songs in the Divaville Lounge collection.

It sound nuts, but there's a good reason for it. Christa showed me to use allmusic.com to search for music info. Which is necessary more often than you might think. Supposing someone calls in requesting Jeri Southern. I don't have any albums of hers, but I might have a song or two on compilations. Or they want the song, say, "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider," but they don't know who sings it. Again, I might have it, but if I haven't played it before, I probably don't know where.

During the hustle and bustle of a show, there is simply no way I could find these songs just by flipping through the binders. Especially if I don't know for sure if I even had them or not. So allmusic.com becomes an invaluable resource. I can search for an artist or song, and see if they turn up on any albums I have. Christa used it even when she knew she had the song, to quickly find the album it was on. If you have over 20 albums by one artist, this can save you a lot of time!

The only problem is, allmusic.com hasn't been working for me. It's been timing out every single time I try to use it. In the past 3 weeks I've tried many times, during the show or not, on different computers and different browsers. Not one successul search. Christa warned me that the site was flaky, but this is ridiculous.

After 3 weeks of this I'm ready to write off allmusic.com. And I've realized that what I really need is a searchable online database of my own music collection. The massive indexing project! Luckily, due to the massive archiving project, at least half the collection is still on either my computer or Georg's. (We didn't want to delete the files in case one of the CDRs went bad.) A thousand thanks to Lisa and D. for pointing out last night that iTunes generates an XML file of its library. Thus sparing me from having to import the data from all those hundreds of albums, one at a time.

It was easy as pie to import the iTunes libraries into Filemaker. Unfortunately Filemaker's "web publishing" feature leaves much to be desired. If I had a permanent IP address for my computer, I could link directly to the database through a web interface. But, I don't. If I had the more expensive "server" version of Filemaker I could export the DB to a searchable web page. But, I don't.

What I'm left with is exporting the DB to one big long humongous web page, comprising a big long humongous table which displays every record. Not exactly what I wanted. So the next step will be to export the Filemaker database to MySQL, and then write PHP pages to display the song info exactly the way I want.

It won't be ready by today's show, since I don't feel like rushing to get it done this morning. And then there are still all the albums that weren't in our iTunes, which will indeed have to be added manually, one at a time. Still, I feel better just knowing that I have a plan. In the meantime I can search Christa's and my old playlists if I need song info. It's not perfect because it only includes songs that have been played on prior shows, but it's a pretty good stopgap.

Christa's final Divaville was weird at first, then lots of fun, then sad at the end. We both literally wiped away tears so we could take a picture at the end of the show.

It was clear that her regular listeners were feeling sad too. We got tons of requests including many for songs that were fitting for the occasion, like "We'll Meet Again" and "Go Out West." Here's the playlist.

Over the past couple of weeks we got into a good rhythm, with one of us managing the board and answering the phone, and the other handling the computer, updating the playlister and looking up songs. It's going to be hard to go back to doing it all by myself! Though I'm sure I won't get nearly so many calls, which will make it much less hectic.

It's kind of hard to believe that Divaville, the show I've been guest hosting for years and have been a loyal listener for even more years, is now my responsibility. I'm sad and nervous and excited all at the same time. It's really weird.

But Christa's Divaville isn't over. She's talking about doing the show either online or at a community station in Portland. I hope she's able to get that going soon. I want to listen to it! It will be like Divaville West and Divaville (Lounge) East.