As the clock ticked over to 10pm, I was aware that, for the first time ever, Eight or Sixteen had crossed the two hour barrier.
I should note that, in the world of podcasting, this isn’t particularly impressive. The latest episode of the Linus Tech Tips WAN Show, for instance, clocks in at a stonking four hours and 21 minutes.
But for Rob and I, it was a marathon. Luckily (for our audience, mainly) we were joined by a very special guest, who made those two hours fly by.
What happened next was gut-wrenching.
Up until last week, I’d never lost anything remotely important, content-wise. Sure, the odd b-roll clip, thumbnail photo, or even a-roll shoot has gone missing, but those instances are rare and easily recoverable.
Now, I know the feeling of losing something important. And it is utterly horrible.
That brilliant two-hour recording of Eight or Sixteen was due to be readied for publication the next day by my external editor. All that remained was to obtain the local recording from our special guest, prep the audio, and send it on.
The guest’s audio arrived early last Friday. From a distance, everything looked fine. The file came across quickly via Google Drive, and was large enough to suggest that it contained plenty of juicy audio data; every word of that wonderful conversation had, clearly, been committed forever to digital storage. I couldn’t wait to hear it back and get the episode published (the podcast had, after all, been absent for about three weeks).
I started the process of readying the audio files for the editor. As usual, the pristine audio from Rob and I was a cinch and ready in minutes. Then, came the freshly downloaded file from our guest. Before throwing it into Logic Pro, I hit the space bar on my Mac to preview the audio.
That can’t be right.
The audio quality was fine but there was a problem. Every other word was missing, with the guest’s vocal skipping hurriedly forwards in a manner akin to a CD-driven disco from the 1990s with an overexubernt crowd and a loose dance floor.
I scrubbed through the file.
The skipping was present throughout.
In a state of increasing desperation, I checked the Google Drive folder again and regained some hope - another track was available for download, this time containing the master output from the guest’s RØDECaster Pro II. Maybe that would be ok, I thought, while fervently hitting the download button.
It wasn’t. The master output file was just as skippy, jumpy, and unusable as the mic channel file. There was literally nothing I could do; the audio from our guest was completely unsalvageable.
I broke the bad news to the guest who was, understandably, gutted. And I won’t lie - I was, too; I could genuinely have cried. I immediately thought back to that long night of recording (yet another taken away from my family and the abundance of other priorities I have filling my to-do list at the moment), and what would undoubtedly have been one of the best episodes of Eight or Sixteen to date.
All that work and off-the-cuff brilliance... gone. And, from past experience losing far less impressive things, I know that you can never repeat a piece of content; every recording session is unique. This means we now officially have a ‘lost episode’ of Eight or Sixteen. A bit like Fawlty Towers (if you believe the rumours).
Actually, that’s pretty cool, isn’t it? There were also a bunch of people from my Discord server on the Zoom call, so it was heard beyond Rob, our guest, and myself. That, again, is quite cool.
Equally, it’s not worth crying over spilt milk - even when that milk is an utterly brilliant but ruined piece of content. This was no one’s fault and, arguably, the buck stops with me; I should have ensured there was a backup recording, and I shouldn’t have left it until the last minute to ask the guest to record his audio locally.
The good news? We managed to publish a show this week and, as you can see from the stats below, our unplanned extended absence from the podcast airwaves hasn’t dented the audience’s thirst for new episodes.
Even better news is that our special guest is returning next week to do it all over again, and I genuinely can’t wait.
P.s. if you’re wondering, we think it was a bad SD card that caused the issue. Tech, eh?
Oh, and while I’ve got you, I’m happy to report that the Solo Club YouTube channel (handily named ‘Mark’s Solo Club’) is up and running! There’s even a couple of videos on there for you to watch - click here to check it out, and let me know what you think!