Bite-sized workloads / "Mood Swings" ----------------- I've been working on this "Yesterday's Tomorrow" project for months, it's finally drawing to a close. Tomorrow I will process the final episode that I set out to do. This is another of the "Tech Nation" episodes. To be honest a lot of the later episodes of this show wasn't that good but I kept it up anyway because I started it. I probably could have got everything done in a weekend if I had wanted to, maybe make some scripts to make the whole process easier. But I kind of like the bite-sized workloads "algorithm". It's a way I can get a lot of tedious work done (eventually) without it being overwhelming. I just need to find a way to turn it into tasks of not more than 10 or 15 minutes a day and do it every morning (if I'm not out of town). So, with that morning task completing tomorrow, I'm asking myself if I want to keep up the routine with something else. Here's what I'm thinking: As I have mentioned I have this internet radio stream ("Divarin Radio", yeah, I know, not the most creative name but what're gonna do?). Currently my usage of this is a random general playlist playing some of the Yesterday's Tomorrow content (Tech Nation, Geek of the Week, etc...) as well as audio of The Computer Chronicles, Net Cafe, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and a few other miscellaneous stuff. And, of course, Chips 'n Dip and soon my wife's show (code-named "Mood Swings", for now), more on this at the bottom of this phlog post. I also have two other things in mind: 1) LibriVox audiobooks, broken up into 1 hour segments. I'm currently looking at one of my favorite author's work (Robert Sheckley). 2) Random Mods (a more proper name coming later). It may be no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have a metric-shit-ton of tracker music partly because I just love tracker music but also because I've been digging through the demoscene looking for content for Chips 'n Dip. Only the best (in my opinion) gets on the show but that doesn't mean the rest is bad. Some of it I just haven't gotten around to checking out yet, others is okay if you're in the right mood. So, a low-effort plan, is to have a script which builds a random playlist out of all of these files, and another script / cron-job to auto-stream this playlist for exactly 1 hour at some set time (yet to be determined). This will save me the work of curating a set (work best left for Chips 'n Dip) and also save my limited Auto DJ storage (since my computer will be streaming directly). It's kind of a mini-Chips 'n Dip-robot. I've been formulating a plan to make all of this content presentation on this "station" a more concrete schedule with specific shows starting at set times rather than just random. But to do that, probably the best (if not easiest) way, is to make sure that a 30 minute show is exactly 30 minutes and a 60 minute show is exactly 60 minutes; instead of (for example) 28:47, or 61:02. There's a few tricks to accomplish that: 1) Tempo-tweaking. Audacity (and other programs) can adjust the tempo of an audio file without affecting the pitch. If you're taking a show that's 61:02 long and shrinking it down to 60:00 then the listener won't notice this change. The same holds true for expanding a show that's a bit too short. If you get too aggressive with this it sounds weird and robotic but if done right it'll sound perfectly fine. For audio books it's a bit trickier. I can break it up into chapters but a chapter read can be anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes depending on the length. If the segment is, say 65:42, and the trailing chapter in the segment is 13 minutes long I can't cut out the last chapter (shifting it to the next segment) because then the segment would be way too short. I don't want to tempo-tweak any one chapter by 5:42, that's getting pretty close to weird-sounding-robot territory. So I can instead calculate how many seconds need to be lost, divide that by the number of sound files in the segment (say like 5 or 6 chapters), and tempo-tweak each one by that; thus distributing the tempo-tweaking over the whole segment. Alternatively I can weigh the tempo-tweaking distribution more heavily on longer chapters but that's a lot of math. Just simple arithmetic but a bit more of a pain. 2) Filler. This is the 2nd trick, fill the unused space with some royalty free music and maybe even do a station identification voice-over. A 47 second musical interlude with me in the middle saying "You're listening to Divarin Radio. Coming up next: Cranky Geeks". This fills the space but also makes the whole thing feel more radio like. Plus it gives me microphone practice which I really need. In some cases I may need to use both of these tricks to get things to time out properly. I think this will be my next bite-sized daily task. Take the content I'm keeping in the rotation and edit each thing to time out to exactly 30 minutes or 60 minutes using the above tricks, and re-upload them. Also do this to new stuff as I add them. When everything that's up there is time-adjusted I can build more planned out playlists and (hopefully) everything will start at their scheduled time and I can post a schedule on the web site (divarin.net/radio) Incidentally, if you do a radio show on aNONradio, tilderadio, or anywhere else and are interested in having it on Divarin Radio as well, then shoot me an email (my SDF username is divarin1) and we'll figure out how to do that. I *think* I have the ability to set up 3rd party DJ accounts but I'm not sure how to do that just yet. Failing that I can set up a cron-job to pull from your stream and push to Divarin radio or can pull your pre-recorded content and push that up. --------- Okay, what the heck is Mood Swings? First off, I'm not talking about my emotions, or anyone else's. As I have been discussing on my BBS (shameless plug: mutinybbs.com:2300), and also in phlog posts here, there is an issue with me doing Chips 'n Dip live at 20:00 UTC starting in November. The issue is that I'm in a time zone that recognizes Daylight Savings Time (DST) and when DST hits (in Nov.) I'll be at work, most likely in a meeting (that could have been an e-mail), during this time-slot. I don't want to prerecord the show so here's the TLDR / end result of what's doing to happen: 1) My time-slot on aNONradio has been extended to two hours (Wed. 20:00 - 22:00 UTC) 2) For the remainder of Oct. I'll be doing Chips 'n Dip at 20:00 UTC as normal, at 21:00 UTC you'll be hearing Mood Swings (name not yet finalized) 3) Mood Swings is a show my wife (SDF username "herefornow") will put together. I have no idea what it is, it'll be whatever she's in the mood to bring you. I think that's great. I don't really want two hours of tracker music, or two hours of any one type of music. I want my listeners to be "hungry" for Chips 'n Dip when it airs which brings me to #4: 4) Starting in Nov. Chips 'n Dip and Mood Swings will swap positions. Mood Swings will start at 20:00 UTC and Chips 'n Dip will start at 21:00 UTC. Mood Swings will be prerecorded so I don't have to do anything during my meeting-that-could-have-been-an-email. When I'm free from work (hopefully) at 21:00 UTC I can start Chips 'n Dip live. 5) I don't know if my wife will be in COM during the show or not. She's not exactly a techy geek like us so the terminal is, to her, places where hackers go to fix computers when they are misbehaving. Having said that I will encourage her to go there because she would probably appreciate the feedback if people are liking her music, albeit it'll probably be in the form of "divarin1++" instead of "herefornow++" since the aNONradio chat bot will be putting my handle in front of each of the tracks displayed in COM. 6) Q: Why not have two shows from two DJs: herefornow and divarin1? A: Because the two shows need to keep swapping time-slots every 6 months and that requires an action from SDF membership which isn't always the most responsive and also has their hands full with other issues. I thought it'd be easiest to just have one two-hour time-slot that I could fill as necessary. I did bring up the other option to membership and solicited their opinion but I never got a response from that. 7) Q: Why the name "Mood Swings"? A: My wife has expressed concerns that people won't like her show because her music tastes are so varied, it could be Enya one day, and Metallica the next. But I told her that's a good thing, don't worry about it, just do whatever you feel like. I can also sense some of the more cynical (and maybe misogynistic) readers are thinking "Oh here we go, a wife is butting her head into her man's hobby". Let me assure you this is the opposite of the truth. It was my idea to have her try this because a) I think she'd enjoy it and it would get her our of her own head sometimes, and b) I don't know if I have the free time to curate another hour of music every week on top of what I'm already doing. But I told her that if this feels like a chore for her to let me know and stop doing it because I could fill the time myself. I think she's starting this as a favor to me but my hope is that she will enjoy it and also if she doesn't enjoy it that she is honest with me about that fact so she can be free of it and not feel obligated. .