Sep 29 2004
Taking Over Whole Wheat Radio
FINAL UPDATE (Oct. 3/04): I recorded a show, one full hour, live with no edits, and what a mess. There were some real golden moments, which I may post later for a laugh, but like I said, it ain’t easy. Jenny and I managed to get through the hour by playing 4 or 5 songs to give us some breathing space, but until I get all the technical crap sorted out, I won’t even try it again. It’s the TECHNICAL bullsh-t you have to deal with that takes all the fun out of it. (I may elaborate later in another post — when and if I’m ready to give it another go.)
The other day I tuned into Whole Wheat Radio to hear Jimbob begin his usual 11:00am live rant of the day (though it comes on at 4:00pm where I’m living). Quite often Jim isn’t in the mood for a rant, and this becomes the topic of his rant, how he’s basically feeling too depressed to give a damn. Sometimes he manages to dig himself out of the hole he’s in; sometimes he doesn’t and ends up digging a deeper, darker, more depressing hole full of negativity and hopelessness. I might tune out at this point, but it doesn’t matter; I can appreciate what he’s doing because at least he’s being real, which is more than I can say for anything I’ve ever heard on other radio stations. And then some days Jim knows when not to push it, and doesn’t even turn on the mic. Instead, as he did the other day, he’ll cue up an old show from some other time when he was feeling more communicative, and just sit back, I suppose, and think of better days. I don’t know.
But the other day while I was listening to one of these pre-recorded shows, I thought, You know, I could probably do this if I had to — turn on a mic and wing it for about an hour. What the hell! So last night as I’m just about to go to bed, my girlfriend, Jenny, and I got into a conversation about how it’s assumed in a man-woman relationship that the woman will take on the last name of the guy she’s getting hitched to, and then their kids end up having the father’s last name instead of the mother’s. As Jenny began to go on about all this (because I really didn’t have much to say about it), I decided to put a tape recorder between the two of us and hit RECORD, thinking, Hey, this could be a show! I’ve heard Jimbob and Esther talk about… well, nothing… for an entire hour — and maintain at least thirty listeners the whole time — so I figured this couldn’t be any worse. But let me tell you, it ain’t easy.
I recorded about ten minutes of our conversation, and then this morning I mixed in some Whole Wheat Radio music (J-Walk’s "Blues Jam in G") and a "blog alert" to make it sound authentic, and then I topped it off with my version of Skinny Legs. The whole thing is about 12 minutes long, and maybe it’s no worse than anything you might normally hear on Whole Wheat Radio.
However, before I post it (if I post it), I’ll have to: a) Ask J-Walk’s permission to use his song; b) Ask Jim and/or Esther what they think of the idea; and c) Ask Jenny’s permission to post it. Until then, you can listen to this short sample to get an idea of what I’m talking about. We’ll see what happens…
UPDATE (Sept. 29/04): It’s a no go. I asked Jenny, and she thinks we can do better. She said I was mumbling too much — whatever! I think she’s just a big scaredy-cat. Anyway, I’ll record a full-hour show by next week, even if I have to go solo.
UPDATE #2 (Sept. 30/04): In preparation for recording a “show,” I bought this Logitech PC headset today with mute and volume control… Just hooked it up to my PC. I can’t get any kind of music to play through the headphones (yes, I checked the volume control), and after dicking around with some settings, I was able to record sound from my mic. But that turned off my basic inline signal, so I can’t record or ‘broadcast’ voice and music playing on my PC at the same time. Great. I wish I could check out the Whole Wheat Radio setup and learn from Jim. (To be continued…)
You kidding? Absolutely! I love it and would love to air it. And what a well thought-out and well-written synopsis of the rant and the moods involved. Sometimes I get so pissed at my inane rambling that I purposely throw myself into something I really feel strongly about. I think that’s usually when it gets good - or at least I can stand to listen to the recording of it later. But it’s hard to sustain for more than a few minutes particularly when it’s unscripted. I come to have incredible respect for Robin Williams and real comedians / performers who can remain at a fevered pitch for an hour or more in front of a live audience.
Ha!!!!! Permission to use my song! Oh man, that’s rich. No way, man.
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Just kiddin’. Of course you can use it. Just edit out all the bad parts, though. You’ll be left with a 5-second clip of pauses.
I’ve been trying to get Weberly to get on Skype and rant to WWR when she starts going off on GWB. She says she won’t rant for a microphone. I’ll have to work on a way to conceal a microphone on myself one day when I feel a rant coming on. We’ll see. Stay tuned…
you could run your own shoutcast station! it’s actually a lot easier than you would think if you just wanna play music and talk over your mic to the 1 listener that’s tuned in… http://www.shoutcast.com
I went to ShoutCast. Too much involved. Just looking at it I can tell something would inevitiable go wrong, distablize my system, or I’d get 95% through it and then they’d tell me I need to install a $200 soundcard to complete the process. The procedure they outline on the site is just a bit too involved for me right now. I don’t have the time to dick around with something like that, and I have no doubt it would take hours and hours of dicking around with it to make it work properly. Reading this message from the site is enough to discourage me:
“Installing and using SHOUTcast broadcasting software is a little challenging, but with some patience you can be broadcasting in no time at all.” Right.
P.S. (Oct. 1): It appears that the Shoutcast website hasn’t been updated since 1999. What’s up with that?
I might get Jody to set it up for me by remote if possible. But right now I have too many other things on the go to even risk getting sucked into something I know would take up too much of my time.
I’ll try to post something, though, by the end of this weekend. (I bet you can’t wait.)
Anyone know how to work these damn microphone headsets! What damn software do I need now? Argh!
I said WE were mumbling too much, not you. I also don’t think we were all that interesting.
software? windows volume control. :) you probably have the microphone muted in there, i think that’s the default, for some stupid reason.
What I need is some software specifically designed for this kind of headset — so I can properly test out the headset. Right now I’m just using some cheap audio editing software called GoldWave v5.05 (which I use to record music off the ‘net and to transfer tapes to my PC). It does pick up the microphone output, but the volume is so low that when I play something through WinAmp, the music comes through so loud it practically blows out my speakers — my voice is there, but it’s completely drowned out by the distortion. I need some software that puts it all together at a normalized volume, or allows me to easily set the volume of each audio source.
It’s possible that my NVIDIA nForce Sound Card just doesn’t support this headset.
I have the microphone working a bit better now, but it’s certainly not as easy as the instructuions would imply, which simply tell me to plug in the headset and turn up the volume in the headphones. That’s it. But anyway, progress is being made.
Whole Wheat Radio, the East Coast edition, won’t be on the air anytime soon.
See the latest update to this post.
BTW, I spent more time checking out what Miata2k has done with his archive of old WWR Rants … and although I have some that are older, it may be awhile before I get them posted and I’ll probably never have the descriptions Miata was doing at the time he archived these.