Due to circumstances mostly beyond my control, Mark and I recorded what should have been last month's podcast just a few hours ago. I haven't cut it together yet, but should have it edited and uploaded by the end of the week. We had a lot to say, so this one's a particularly long 80 minutes unedited. By comparison, our unprocessed episodes usually come out to around 67 minutes and edit down to about an hour.
In other news, I've developed a cheap system in which I can archive original and finished podcast tracks losslessly. Having lost eight episodes to a failed hard drive and two more to a lost CD, I've decided to use a linear and slightly more fault-tolerant medium: I can buy a ten-pack of Sony Hi-Fi 90-minute cassette tapes at Target for about $5. There's a problem where each tape can only record 45 minutes per side, though our episodes frequently run much longer. A quick solution I've discovered is to split our mono tracks in half, then record them as a half-length stereo mix with the left channel consisting of the first half and the right channel consisting of the second half. Assuming minimal channel bleed, this should prove rather effective as long as we never record an episode longer than 120 minutes, at which point I'd have a hard time finding tapes. In the long run, it should also transfer to tape at twice the speed, since the actual length of the audio is cut in half, and analog tape systems generally create a 1:1 time reproduction. I haven't implemented this in hardware yet, though the software end can easily be accomplished with a simple split and track addition in Audacity.