Question about burning podcasts to CDs: I haven’t ever tried to do it with podcasts or TV shows, just music, but the CDs I have don’t hold much runtime, so for something like The Silt Verses, I would only be able to put 2-3 episodes on each CD. Is this just a problem of having cheap CDs and there are ones out there I could buy that hold much more? And how do you go about burning podcasts to CDs? As I said, only ever burned music to CDs.
Hi there! Okay, so I'm prefacing this with the caveat that I"m no expert, just a hobbyist and a self-taught one at that. With a quick Google search, it looks like the standard commercially-available blank CDs only come with a runtime of 80 minutes, and even the higher end ones only have 90 and you need special equipment for those. Fortunately, I don't think it's a you problem of cheap CDs. Unfortunately, I don't think this is something that'll be changing any time soon. With the advent of streaming I don't see any CD runtime innovations in the near future. That said, blank CDs can be bought in bundles for fairly cheap! I got a pack of 100 for only about $25!
Since you know how to burn music, I'm assuming you already have the requisite tech! For those of you following along at home, I have an external CD drive that plugs into my laptop via USB. With what I've been able to get onto my laptop, it's more than paid for itself! My laptop also had the programs for CD ripping/burning natively installed - it's part of Windows Media Player. My laptop is probably old enough to attend middle school now, mind, so I'm not sure what the current set-up for this looks like on more modern devices. So, there are third-party podcasts-to-MP3 services. I can't vouch for their quality, safety, or legality but lucky for us, the Silt Verses team has made the show available for download on Acast (and through their Patreon, I'm assuming!)! I don't usually download podcasts to listen to, so if you know where else to download them go there! (Of course, now I can't find the download links on Acast, but I swear they were there!) Once you've got that MP3 file, do it the same way you'd burn any old song to a CD! If you have access to audio editing software, I recommend snipping the ads out. Unless you want to keep them for historical/archival reasons, in which case keep 'em in! That would be kinda cool, actually!
I think the trickiest thing here is the 80 minutes/CD limitation. If the average Silt Verses episode is about 40 minutes, you can't quite fit two on each disc. The Silt Verses has about 46 episodes and the second part of the finale might need to be further split across two discs. You can get that number down if you don't mind trimming episodes and fitting them together, but that does make it a bit choppy. That's not including any bonus content either like the Q&As. Truthfully, I'm not sure how they'd be able to produce CDs even in an official capacity with these limitations! (We can't all have render farms or DVD duplication machines in our homes like Mr. Markiplier!) I live in a shoebox, so trying to find the space for 46+ CDs of the same work is a bit prohibitive. (Still might do it eventually, I quite adore TSV.) And remember, discs are not forever! They have a shelf life, and disc rot is a real thing! From what I've read, the conventional wisdom is always have three backups for anything important or valuable to you, one of which should be an off-site backup. (For some folks, that's The Cloud™, but always bear in mind that The Cloud™ is just someone else's computer.) That said, I did just burn Let Me Speak First Of Revelations to a CD that's now currently in my car's CD drive. Emergency Silt Verses for the road! (My car is also old enough to have one of those, haha.)
EDIT: And try to include the metadata if you can! Knowing who wrote, directed, acted, etc in an episode and the year it was released can add context if you're trying to keep historical context details in there!
Having said that, a decent compromise for wanting to have the whole Silt Verses (or any podcast) safely on hand without needing 46 CDs (or more, imagine trying to CD something like The Magnus Archives!) could be a high storage capacity modern MP3 device! I think the term for those devices is "digital audio player." They make those these days with storage capacities in gigabytes. Gigabytes! I don't have one myself but I might look into it when I can - one of those would also count as you three forms of backup.
Wow, that's a lot of information! Sorry if it's a bit much! I hope I was able to answer your question, and let me know how your podcast-burning adventures go! I'd love to hear all about it! (And if there's anyone with more knowledge on the topic, please feel free to chime in! This is very much not my area of expertise but I want people to know these things!)
