I didn’t have to work Sunday, which meant I had Saturday night off (I’ll explain that later), so I brought my checkbook up to date (depressing) and balanced it for the last two months (also depressing), and then feeling I needed (and deserved) a little pick-me-up, I did a short episode (number five) of Project Wideawake.

Doing a podcast is a somewhat complicated affair. I use GarageBand as a mixing board, laying down my voice tracks and adding in music and sound effects, and very roughly controlling the levels of the different tracks. Once everything is arranged the way I like it, I then export it to disk. Unfortunately, GarageBand (or at least the six-year-old version I have) only allows me to export it as an .m4a file. So I then have to import it into Audacity, where I export it as an .mp3 and add artist, album, year, and track information. I then upload it to my server using Transmit (an awesome and inexpensive FTP client for Mac), write the actual post where I link to the .mp3 file, and publish the post.

Somewhere in that process, I accidentally deleted most of the voice tracks from the GarageBand file before I exported it as a song. I don’t know how I did that, and I don’t have a good reason for not checking it before I got too far along in the process, other than I was tired and in a hurry.

I should have realized this when I imported the file into Audacity, because it gives you a nice soundwave picture, and there were obvious gaps indicating pure silence. I did notice, but they just didn’t register. I should have looked more closely at the monitor.

So I’m going to go back and record new voice tracks to replace the ones I deleted. Obviously, they will be different from what I originally recorded, and I will have to rearrange things. I’ll update the post when it’s finished.

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