As I mentioned last night in the cast, I tend to get a little over-involved with things I'm interested in, the OtC cast being a prime example. I need to back away from some of that. I need to add a new goal of a time constraint on my show preparation. Here are the changes I'm looking at.
Theme development. Thinking of themes is fairly easy. I have a lot of unused themes on the shelf, and I can always recycle themes from the past. This cast has featured themes from almost the very beginning. I feel like themes are a key feature of OtC, and I'd like to continue to use them. However, gathering songs to fit a theme can be somewhat time-consuming, depending on the theme. Going forward, I need to be less obsessive about finding every possible song in my collection that fits the theme. The weekly Source Playlist won't be as extensive.
Song evaluation. My practice has been to preview every song I find that fits a theme for the purpose of assigning a "star" rating, The ratings go from zero to five in one-half star increments. I then publish all songs I rate 3 stars or higher in the Source Playlist for the viewers to see. The objective is to show a list of quality songs for the theme and to let me play the best possible songs during the cast. When evaluating the songs, I also try to spiff up the mp3 tags, often adding the composer, genre, and year of release. I like to highlight (for myself) any tracks that are instrumental only.
Unfortunately, this can be quite time-consuming. It's not unusual for me to preview 400 songs a week. At a minute per song, that's close to 7 hours per cast. The good thing is that I find a lot of good songs and that makes the cast better, especially the final hour or two when requests tend to taper off. The bad thing is that I almost always find more good songs than can be played in the time we have. Therefore, I'm doing work for no benefit. I need to stop evaluating every song. This will affect the ranked Source Playlist. It will either have fewer total songs on it, or I might discontinue it altogether (the ranked list only). It will also mean that I likely won't go overtime on the cast as often since I won't have as many known good songs that didn't get played yet. Finally, it might mean that I'll do some different kinds of themes that are easier (quicker) to find good songs for.
Publishing. Before each cast, I update this website. That process is fairly quick (less than 1/2 hour), however, if there is no ranked Source Playlist, I might have to change around some aspects of the site. I might make other changes as well to streamline things.
Other Stuff. Many weeks, I bring in other elements to the cast or update the channel design. For example, for the "Feet" cast I downloaded lots of images of animal feet and displayed them PIP. That took hours. For the "Horses" cast, I located and downloaded videos of Mr. Ed, Quick Draw McGraw, college horse mascots, and the Clydesdales. That also took hours. I need to make a conscious effort to not let myself get sucked in to spending a lot of time on that kind of stuff.
We'll see how it all goes. Hopefully, I'll still be able to put on a cast I can be proud of, and you'll still enjoy coming to on a Monday night.