Winding down the Big Trip experience

This week’s title has a dual meaning – Twin Falls, Idaho, the featured market this week, was one of the last stops on Big Trip 2007, and we present a more-or-less complete run of IDs from that small city, including our first chance to hear KAWZ and KEFX on their main transmitters, as opposed to any of their 16,552 translators from coast to coast.

And as we continue to share some of our tips for “How To Do A Big Trip,” it’s also a chance for us to talk about what happens after the trip is over and we come home. Following a few days of sleep, it’s time to digest everything we’ve recorded.

There’s no deadline for this, as there is for the trip itself, and so the aftermath of the trip tends to be much longer than the trip itself and the preparation for the trip combined. Indeed, here we are almost exactly a year to the day after starting Big Trip 2007 and we’re still recapping it on Toppy and over on Tower Site of the Week. That’s partially because we actually listen to all those tapes – pulling IDs as we go from more than 50 unscoped C-90s of morning shows and other interesting local programming from the markets we visited (we finished listening to those sometime in July), and about 15 more C-90s full of IDs that need to be scoped down and archived.

These days, that’s done mainly digitally – I go from cassette right into my PC, where I use an older version of Cool Edit 2000 to record the audio and clean it up. (The “Noise Reduction” feature works quite well and is used for many of my ID cuts here.) We use a small piece of software called MP3Tag to label our cuts, and FileZilla to upload them to the site.

And now that we’re mostly done with Big Trip 2007…there’s another 50 or so tapes of scoped IDs that need editing, plus 140 or so unscoped tapes, from 2007-2008 visits to Roanoke, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, New York City, Chicago, Milwaukee, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Las Vegas, Bakersfield, LA, San Diego, Tijuana, Palm Springs…and maybe it’s time to stop typing and get back to work.

(This doesn’t even get into what we do with the DVDs of local TV news and station IDs, the stacks of newspapers, the bumper stickers, or all the other detritus of a Big Trip…we’ll address THAT in a future installment, perhaps!)