MP3 Compression Software

[UltraRob]

So, I was listened to the Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) radio show Podcast (easily found on I-tunes) and I decided to check out the info for the show. When I check it, I suddenly find out that 45 minutes of good quality talk and music are all being done at a 32kbit bitrate. So, my question is, what the heck are they using to compress it? (It says "unknown" in the info.) I'd love to get my 1/2 hour podcast sounding that good and only 9mb a podcast too, instead of the 96kbit I have to use to make it sound half decent.

Rob

[X Pat Radio]

So, I was listened to the Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame) radio show Podcast (easily found on I-tunes) and I decided to check out the info for the show. When I check it, I suddenly find out that 45 minutes of good quality talk and music are all being done at a 32kbit bitrate. So, my question is, what the heck are they using to compress it? (It says "unknown" in the info.) I'd love to get my 1/2 hour podcast sounding that good and only 9mb a podcast too, instead of the 96kbit I have to use to make it sound half decent.

Rob

It has a lot more to do with how well its produced to start with. Are they stereo or mono? I am always trying to get a better sound, and using finalizing software on the WAV file before compression has helped a lot. Sure its not cheap, but then neither is what Penn uses.

Andy

I use T-RackS 24

[UltraRob]

They're in Mono, and yeah, I suspected having professional equipment in the first place helps immensely. I'll look into finalizing the WAV files, thanks for the tip!

Rob

[X Pat Radio]

They're in Mono, and yeah, I suspected having professional equipment in the first place helps immensely. I'll look into finalizing the WAV files, thanks for the tip!

Rob

Mono means you can get twice the bitrate for the same size file.

http://www.t-racks.com/


Andy

[Shawn]

I subscribe to a couple different podcasts that are basically repurposed radio shows. I've also been surprised to hear the sound quality of these programs, considering most of them are encoded at 48k or lower. I'm sure the quality has a lot to do with the fact that they're producing the shows on high-end, broadcast-grade equipment. Must be nice to have access to that kinda gear.

[X Pat Radio]

I subscribe to a couple different podcasts that are basically repurposed radio shows. I've also been surprised to hear the sound quality of these programs, considering most of them are encoded at 48k or lower. I'm sure the quality has a lot to do with the fact that they're producing the shows on high-end, broadcast-grade equipment. Must be nice to have access to that kinda gear.

Don't fotget all the education, skill and talent of the people working the sound board for the show.

[paul]

My favorite stingy encoders are the Emmanuel Goldstein podcasts (off the hook and off the wall)
http://www.2600.net
...which are encoded at 16kbps MP3, and you know what? the audio quality never bothers me. I even feel my choice to do 64 kbps MP3s and 48 kbps WMAs are overkill--sure I notice a difference between the original 24-bit file and the compressed version, but often that compression has a tendency to clean up the sound by scraping away the detail, which isn't always studio quality detail.

But 6.95 MB for a one-hour show! Really nice stingy use of bandwidth and the hard drives of their listeners. I'd like to do a low-bandwidth feed too, but I feel like I already work hard enough to get out a weekly show:)

[Preston Buttons]

We use cool edit pro and set the mp3 rate to 64k/22050mhz and it sounds great but the original files are quite clean (wavs). If we did mono (which we actually should) our shows would be less than 10mb for 30 minutes.