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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.