Did my first radio show of the term last Thursday morning -- from 2 to 4 am! I'd had a busy week, so staying coherent while laying down the tunes was a bit difficult. I used ecasound to record my set, with imperfect results. I haven't quite got the buffer size right, so there were a few dropouts here and there. With the buffer too small, there are short clicks; too big, and it's smooth but with missing sections. It seems like this shouldn't be a hard problem. I'll have to investigate how to make a proper recording. Also played some samples off my laptop -- need to find or write some good sample playback software for Linux.
LAME seems to suck at low bitrates, sounding really "swishy" down at 56k joint stereo, and only becoming listenable at 64k mono. So I encoded my show using VBR to yield a 82mb file with an average bitrate close to 96k. Here are the results.
(Since there's now no need to patch against the ISO reference source, I think LAME should now be called LIME, for "LIME *Is* an Mp3 Encoder".)