There’s been numerous issues getting Spam Spam Spam Humbug episodes recorded lately. Much of that is on my end; I’ve been increasingly busy, and I don’t always know when my free evenings will happen…not to within more than a day or so, at any rate, which makes it difficult to schedule the podcast crew (who have lives of their own, and can’t always drop everything on a dime to hop onto Discord).

Discord itself, speaking thereof, is another issue. We’ve been using a bot — Craig — to record audio streams for podcasts, and for the longest time it worked well for our purposes. However, lately, Craig has been introducing issues into recordings; it drops audio intermittently, which is a pain to edit around, and it also seems to lose track of timeline a little bit; I typically record my audio separately, as well as with Craig, and the two streams have lately been failing to line up. I don’t know if that’s because Craig has been dropping silent bits of streams unbidden; regardless: the tool that I gravitated to because it saved me a lot of editing headache for podcast episodes has been introducing a lot of editing headaches over the last few months.

There’s also the issue of time: recordings beginning at 9:30 PM in the Mountain time zone tend to mean late evenings for just about every other podcast participant; it’s not a convenient time by any stretch of the imagination.

I’ve been looking at a few options, all of which come out of the emerging social audio space. The most well-known option in this space is Clubhouse, which I have the ability to record thanks to a service from Headliner (the company I use to auto-generate podcast videos for social media sharing). Another option is Spotify Greenroom, which — being part of the Spotify ecosystem, alongside podcast hosting company Anchor.fm (which I use) — means that I can automatically post Greenroom chats as podcast episodes, if I so desire. And the third option is Twitter Spaces, which has the advantage of being the most accessible; Spaces can be joined (ostensibly) from a web browser, and most people who take part in Spam Spam Spam Humbug these days have a Twitter presence of some sort. The major disadvantage of Spaces is the lack of an easy recording feature.

I’m not sure which of these I’ll move the podcast to, if any; I may keep it on Discord. But in the coming weeks, I may take a few opportunities to test these other technologies, and then at different times of the day. Who knows? Maybe it would be easier to host shorter recordings at, say, noon (still in the Mountain time zone) on weekdays; European Ultima Dragons might have an easier time taking part therein.