July 20

2024-07-20 – The Extended Absence

Yeah, no, we haven’t ended the show. We just took a longer than expected break from it because of other plans popping up and a technical error that resulted in losing the last broadcast. Firstly, we went live on Mixlr and had a pretty decent show around mid-July. Tony went through his normal duty of saving the file and ran into a hiccup in the form of no existing file to upload to the cloud. We’ve had this happen before where the file took a while to show up, so I figured it would just take few minutes to show up.. OR.. worst case scenario, I would be able to pull the temp file it saved somewhere in the Windows common files. I was wrong. I combed through every temp file on that laptop and found nothing resembling the size and date of the audio file that was supposed to have generated. I submitted a ticket with Mixlr as a longshot, pretty confident in the fact that this was just a lost episode, but just maybe.. they had a backup somewhere in the ether.

Just a quick note to say that in the whole time we’ve done this, we’ve had very few completely lost episodes. One other one that stuck out was the Halloween episode many years back when we started where we had my friend Vikki on and we decided to talk about the eerie happenings that occurred when our friend group decided to mess around with the oujia board. Everything went fine with recording on Audacity, but after reviewing the saved file, we realized that the recording somehow recorded over itself, meaning somehow… parts of us talking were talking over other parts. To this day, I have no earthly idea how it could even do that and no other Audacity recordings have done it since then. I chalk this all up to the possibly existence of supernatural entities possibly reaching over from the other side, not wanting us to divulge our experiences. This was part of the reason why we went to Mixlr.

Back to recent events.. What happened was that in the process of troubleshooting the weird feedback we were getting (and discovering it was, oddly enough, a very kinked USB cable that was the culprit), Tony had messed with the settings on Mixlr, trying to get the correct source loaded and accidentally “unchecked” the “REC” button on the bottom right of the settings page. To be fair, it was very small and could easily be missed as there is just a small red dot when it’s on and gray when it’s not. So when we loaded up the live page and heard ourselves talking, it didn’t really help in this instance. We just told Mixlr to air our live broadcast but save nothing.

That’s the first time that’s ever happened in Mixlr and it was completely human error. There was a point before I figured this out (with the help of Mixlr’s support staff, who were very quick to respond and were knowledgeable as well) that I thought it was the old laptop dying and that it was possibly a hard drive starting to fail. My temporary remedy was to either replace it with my Surface Pro or have the Surface Pro logged into the live page, with Audacity open and live recording any audio that it was transmitting. I came across a page on how to have Audacity record anything you listen to, whether it be Spotify or any other audio source.

I’m sure there’s a more technical way to have a passthrough device that simultaneously records the mixer’s output but I just couldn’t be bothered to research more solutions that may involve copious amounts of reading and more money to invest in this Mickey Mouse operation. I’m simultaneously glad that it was such an easy remedy but a little annoyed that Tony had so very little to do but to just sit in his chair, complain about money, death and home ownership and just press a button and check that a few things were set up. I won’t even bother rehashing all of the work that I’ve had to do on this show since it started because by the time the paragraph was over with, I would have convinced myself to quit.

-Nhat