Helpful Holiday Hint!

If you’re like me at Christmas, you spare a good bit of no expense to provide nothing but second best the best for the guy whose name you picked out of a hat your loved ones. In that helpful spirit, here is how you get out-of-print songs that you don’t own off of the internet and onto your knock-off brand X mp3 player!

1. Download some cheese-eating audio editing software… like the one that rhymes with “Shmaw-dacity.”

2. Get a mini-to-mini audio cable (stereo.)  It helps if you swiped a bunch of these from the place you used to work. (Sorry, I left that out.)

3. Connect the audio out from one laptop to the mic in of a second laptop. (Oh yeah, you need two PCs. Dang it!)

4. Find the song on YouTube or something.

5. Record the song into the editing software.

6. Save As something remotely usable, like .wav, instead of whatever goofy proprietary file extension they give you.

7. Load the song into Windows Media Player on the first PC.

8. Burn the song onto a CD. It’s better to get ten or songs before you do this. (Again, sorry.)

9. Rip the songs BACK into Media Player, as .wma’s this time.

10. Sync the song to your cheesy brand-X mp3.

11. Repeat until exhausted, or until mp3’s become obsolete.

In all seriousness, Audacity is a little chunkified, but I have used it a lot to get my old LP’s (look it up, kids) into my mp3.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Remember, friends, Christmas can be a time of frustration and deep family weirdness…

…oh, were you expecting a “but“? I thought you knew me better!

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Memo from the Word Mill

Fingers are flying here at LivelyExchange. My indentured elves are busy milling words to within 0.003 tolerance while they fantasize about my grisly demise, and ways to make it look like an accident. Let’s take a look at the lineup of recent or ongoing print, web and video projects clogging the pipes:

• A regular blogging gig writing about Charleston dining, shopping, healthcare, real estate, tourism and history
• An article about Charleston real estate
• An article about all the holiday happenings in Charleston
• A daily Twitter campaign for a web marketing firm in Charleston
• Tweeting, blogging and press releases for a cabinet refacing firm in Charlotte
• Website copy for:
  • A Christian crossover girl group (known as a CCGG in the recording industry)
  • A commercial cleaning service in Charleston
  • A cardboard tube manufacturer in York SC
  • A Charleston residential REALTOR (why do they write it that way?)
  • A Charleston commercial real estate developer/brokerage/management firm
  • A home designer/builder in Rock Hill SC
• The weekly healthcare sales newsletter
• Print  copy for a healthcare brochure
• A print ad for a handgun manufacturer

And finally, I produced ANOTHER rendition of the Veterans Day video. That’s volume six in the increasingly ill-named “Veterans Trilogy!” Anyway, I have to run…an elf fell into the 2500-ton press. That’s the third one this month, and they are a drag to clean. The rest of you, back to work!

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