Storm was a bit of a (somewhat backhanded) blessing in disguise. Holy crap. I've never spent so many hours troubleshooting audio tech issues...
Everything is pretty much ready now. Queuing music. Recording ad spots. Drilling holes through the wall to run CAT6 so that the streams aren't throttled by wireless bottlenecks. Writing short copy for news. Deciding on how I'll open the show. Walk in the park.
If I didn't live by Guitar Center I'd be losing my mind by now. They should have a cable investment club. Get ten stamps and the next bizarre cable or adapter you spontaneously require is free.
Aside from that, I had to run out to Radio Shack to fix a blown fuse in the mic pre-amp which turns out to have serial humming issues anyway after the storm. Finding out power conditioners generally suck at protecting gear from storm surges made me sad. Or buying a third sound card with ground loop buzzing over USB. All this because automation and broadcast software won't recognize a really nice 16 channel board as anything more than 2 channel mono with left or right panned vocals. Good news though. At the expense of my sanity, those issues are solved. You'll get stereo audio and will want something nice in terms of speakers or headphones to play it over.
After juggling an assortment of USB audio interfaces and cables, that's all been sorted. Spent 6 hours adjusting mix/gate/compression/expander levels on one device, then balancing similar levels between multiple other devices. I think I've got the mic and show audio sounding mighty fine now. Callers will be run through all of the same levels which will be an improvement hopefully over basic Skype audio.
Recording ads and music selection are the easiest things I've done all week. Ads have been single take. Mixing takes seconds. I'll be so glad when I can just relax, do this show and have fun with it after tomorrow.
Amy
