You may remember from last week that the podcast recording went surprisingly smoothly despite the fact that I had mentally prepared myself for it to be a nightmare. It was with this same optimism that I entered into the task of recording this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative, what could possibly go wrong. I didn't get up early enough to record it before lunch so I knew that I had to finish it when I got home in the late afternoon, which is when I remembered that the curse guardian was back from her holiday.
Not that I worried about it while I was out of the house and having a family lunch at my dad's house, but it did weigh on my mind on the way home. Earlier we had been discussing our individual creative methods, (Mandi makes her own greetings cards and my dad makes wall art) and I mentioned how much I hate the process of making something. I enjoy knowing that I have a reasonably good body of work albeit nowhere near as good as I would have liked at my age, but I hate the journey to the finished product. The same was true when I did a live radio show, I would work myself up into a state before I went live but once the microphone was on I was fine. As proud as I am of how successful the podcast is proving to be, I don't enjoy the build up to it as I am prepared for something to go wrong.
Just as I feared after yesterday, RealPlayer has now totally conked out and coughs and farts along cutting songs and not playing songs when I press the play button. Windows Media Player would have been a good option but for the fact that you can't load several songs in and make a playlist. As it stood I would have to play each song by clicking the MP3 itself on the desktop and opening it with Windows Media Player, something of a hit and miss task as tracks can either start before you're ready or buffer for ages. In the end I opened VLC Player (or 'the traffic cone one' as I'm sure we all know it) to see how that was working. I am sure I have used this system before but (remember yesterday when I said I don't like upgrading to new versions of programmes because they change beyond all recognition and no longer work?) you can no longer make a playlist on it so I was in the same situation. However, the MP3 files on my desktop opened straight away using VLC Player so I was at least able to make the podcast provided I concentrated because this now involved a lot more plate-spinning. Another problem arose, I can no longer have the microphone channel and the music channel on at the same time so it sounds a little stilted in places where I switched between the two. This wouldn't be a huge problem if it wasn't for the fact that as soon as you click on one thing on the screen, everything else minimises, so as soon as I press play on a song I have to quickly get the control panel up on the screen so I can swap between microphone and music. Nothing is ever straightforward is it? At least the podcast survives and the curse guardian is thwarted once more.
Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.
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February housekeeping
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