BROADCASTS.com

As you might have guessed by now (and those tuning into Resonance on the 23rd will have surmised) our One Life Left Christmas party it was literally unbroadcastable in the end. Fear not! We're sticking it here for you, essentially unedited. Because we said we would.

But why was the show literally unbroadcastable? Well, two reasons, really:

1) Technical!

Actually, thanks to our amazing on-site engineers Martin (whose voice is the first you hear after Ste's apology) and James we managed to overcome most of the problems. If it wasn't for them there wouldn't be anything for us to apologise for. In a good way, because we wouldn't have recorded anything more than the sound of The One Life Left Team sobbing into booze as our best-laid plans collapsed in front of literally dozens of listeners.

Still, despite their best efforts (and because of our dodgy technology) the audio quality here is poor.

Most of the show, particularly the news section, ended up masked by an irritating whine from somewhere in our hastily-rigged system of wires and pulleys. The magic of post-processing has reduced it in most places and all but eliminated it in others, but you'll notice some fluctuations in our voices. There's also some stop-startyness (technical term) mostly confined the song judging part, which is down to some kind of minidisc jutter as far as I can make out.

The most major problem, though, is that the minidisc recorder we were using is super-sensitive; despite our best efforts in pre-show fiddling the volume from our mics peaked throughout and so the show remains cursed with that hideous crackle the moment mics 1 and 2 go above whisper. Since mic 1 is the overly excitable-Ste and mic 2 is the mostly boistrous Simon... Well. You get used to it but it isn't exactly pleasant. Forewarned.

2) Performance-based!

We had an amazing time that afternoon and the atmosphere in the podcast reflects that. Will that raucous humour translate to people who weren't there? Hmm. There are certainly some brilliant bits -- if you find the whole thing too annoying at least skip forward to Craig 'The Rage''s live poetry, make sure you hear Ann's filthy fiction and yeah, you'll be hearing more clips from Derek Williams' four-song set in future OLL's -- but you may find the rest of it leaves you feeling like you're... Well, on the outside of a party looking in. Which you are.

Have I set your expectations low enough yet? It's not ALL bad. But for the technical issues someone better than us at audio editing could probably make an hour of typical OLL-standard radio out of this. Pad it out with music a bit, drop in a few of the pre-recorded features. Actually, probably by taking the 8-bit Peoples back catalogue, copying it over us in Audacity and then deleting our bit entirely. But regardless there's SOMETHING here, if only proof the event actually happened and encouragement for you to come to the next one. So do that. We have plans but we'll talk about them when we make our return for real. See you in January.

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