27 June 2005 3 Comments

I’m sure you’ve had those days where nothing, absolutely nothing, went right. For me, that day was Saturday.

Roadhouse 019 took 13 hours to put together. I was just completely unfocused, disorganized and highly prone to stupid mistakes. Remember, I record the show pretty much straight through, so that only occupied less than an hour of the day.

The lone small pieces of post-production that I do turned out to be my undoing for this show. Normally, I mix in the closing music and the Creative Commons license statement after recording the show. I like the background music to fade up right at the end of the song, just as I’m closing the show. It’s too tough to time that out, so I usually just mix it in afterward.

There’s also compression, exporting as a wav (so I have a full-res copy of the show), encoding to .mp3 with lame, pushing to two servers, creating the torrent file, creating the show notes, re-writing the feeds for both mp3 and bittorrent, and re-burning the feedburner mp3 feed. I’ve got a pretty good system down, so it’s not normally as much work as it sounds.

Saturday, I kept having issues with the compression. I’d create the project file through Audacity’s compression tool and export the show as a wav. Each and every time, the ending background music and Creative Commons tag were gone in the final wav. Finally, at 10:00 pm, I saved the project as a wav first, including the previously missing pieces, then compressed. Being dog-tired, I encoded to mp3, pushed everything to the servers and went to bed.

Sunday morning, my podcatching client had grabbed the bittorrent download. I listened to the show, happy that this one was behind me. Happy, that is, until I heard the ending. No music, no Creative Commons tag. So, at 8:30 Sunday morning, I re-opened the project files and started the process again – this time, without compression. I listened to the end at every step in the process and finally was able to push both a good mp3 and a good torrent file to the servers.

Except that my steidler.net server was down. That, of course, was the server I’d pushed the mp3, torrent file and both feeds to. Luckily, I was able to push all to the lr2.com server. In an hour or so, everything was working as it should. And the show had an actual ending, though the site was unavailable all day.

So, if you downloaded a version of the show that seemed eerily quiet at the end, it wasn’t a change in format. It was, as we used to say in the ‘80s, “operator headspace.”

Maybe I should create a real checklist …