Podcasting rig for the super-cheap: Debian, the $3 sound card, found microphone

It's no secret that I've been running Debian Lenny for the past month or so, ever since my identical laptop running Ubuntu developed a nasty crack in the screen that rendered it unusable.

On my "remaining" Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, one of the machines I rescued from the trash pile when we moved offices more than a year ago, the sound has been dead almost since the first time I booted it.

I solved the sound problem about 90 percent of the way with a $3 USB Headphone Set sound module from DealExtreme.com. The thing plugs into the USB and actually allows me to hear sound from most applications. Everything except Flash. And I'm not getting "system sounds" either. But music and video files that aren't Flash are coming through great.

I just installed Audacity, and I was able to easily choose my favored sound card for both input and output, and it actually works.

I can record audio. There's a ton of latency (this is standard Debian Stable, no real-time kernel, the aforementioned $3 USB sound module).

I found a cheap mic lying around the office, and while I can't really listen to myself while recording due to the aforementioned latency, I can make a recording.

In standard Debian, you can export from Audacity in Ogg format. I've been burning Oggs off of CDs for days now, and I'm definitely going to make whatever I eventually record, podcastwise, available in that format.

But let's be real, it's an MP3 world.

To export MP3s from Audacity, I read the project's docs, went to the Debian-Multimedia site and grabbed lame and the required lame library. I'm too lazy to add the Debian-Multimedia repository, so I just downloaded the .deb packages and used dpkg to install them.

I confirmed that I can make MP3s as well as Oggs, so I'm good to go.

All I need is a little time to record, and then more time to pump it into a new blog to feed the podcast RSS.

What should I call it? I'm open to suggestions.

Right now I have:

.rant
(dot-rant)