We made use of the time in the car to and from the dinner to try and figure out what was up with the ceremony play lists. Turns out everything played fine except the five songs I edited. Crap!

Thankfully I had the necessary files on my laptop, so once we got back to our room and changed into pjs, I set about figuring out why they wouldn’t play.

(If you have no interest in iPod DJ-ing your wedding or editing song files, you can feel free to skip the next few paragraphs.)

Now, I’d used Audacity to edit the songs in question. These included our processional, unity ceremony, recessional, and two reception songs. Some were edited to trim opening monologues from live recordings, others for length or timing issues. All were purchased from iTunes so I had to first convert the songs to AIFF format (which actually involved burning the songs to a disc and importing them in that format into iTunes) before I could even begin to edit them in Audacity. I then saved the edited versions as AIFF and had no problem playing them from the playlists on my iPod as long as I used iTunes.

What I found out after doing a bit of digging (very little, thank goodness), was that in order to play the edited AIFF files through anything other than an iTunes-equipped computer–like, say, the AV system being used for our ceremony–you need to convert them to MP3 (has to do with compression and bitrates and stuff I don’t generally care about on a day to day basis, but weddings seem to make us care about the strangest things, don’t they?). Thank goodness HLP’s wifi is top notch, since it required downloading a plugin for Audacity to get that part done.

Once I’d figured this out and converted the first song, I went out to my car to make sure it was going to work on any given speaker set.

My victory dance was short-lived, however, when I realized I’d locked myself out of our cottage. In the rain. In my jammies.

Oops.

And since Roadie was in the little groom’s room, I got to take in the atmosphere on the covered porch for a little bit and just hope no one decided to stop by for a visit.

Soon enough, though, I was back inside, edited the remaining four files, copied them over to both iPods (redundancy is our friend) and went back out to the car to check them one more time on each device. This time I remembered to bring a key. (Though, in my defense, I really thought I’d unlocked the door the first time, but Roadie found there was a trick to getting them truly unlocked that I’m still not certain about.)

With that squared away and both iPods charging for the night, there was only one last thing to do: write our vows.

We really did leave them until the last minute, though not intentionally, we just always thought we had more time. Still, it was kind of nice to sit in the living room of our cottage, each with our own thoughts and note cards, penning those very important words for the next morning.

 

The Road Trip Wedding Recaps:

• Dishing the Dirt on the Venue
• Baking & Bride-Napping
• A Moment of Calm
  
• And Then the Chaos
• We Rehearse
• Our Rehearsal Dinner