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Welcome back to podcast answers. If this is the first time that you have been here,
welcome, welcome, welcome. What we do at this show is we help people start and grow their
podcast, answering any podcasting questions along the way. And that's right. Today, we are
that not just like any other day, we're answering the same thing. We're answering podcasting
questions. We've been doing this for a while and we love answering questions for people.
So today, what are we talking about? We're going to be talking about MP3 versus AAC versus Wave.
Like what file format should you put your podcast out there in? There are so many
different podcast formats or different file formats that you could put your file in
to create your show. But what is most important? What is the one that's actually going to work for
you? We're going to talk about that today. But first, guys, if you've not subscribed, go ahead
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So what are the different formats and what should you choose? So if you're recording your show,
which you should be recording your show, let's say to edit it or whatever, however you're recording
your show, you should be recording in a Wave format. That's going to be the format that takes
all of the information in. It's going to have all of the depth of everything that your microphone
puts out, that your sound puts out, that your show is going to be doing. So everything that
you're putting in, a Wave file is going to be the file format that you want to be able to record in.
So that way you can edit in the best clarity. Now, the downside of Wave files is they are huge.
They can be multi gig big depending on how long your recording is. So if your recording is an hour,
your Wave files are going to be extremely, extremely huge. And that does not go well over the
internet because one of the things about the way podcasting works, the files are delivered
over the internet. So if your files are huge, they can't handle that. And in fact, most podcasting
apps when they see a Wave file, they're probably actually not going to play it because they're
just not the way it's set up to be. So MP3, which is short for MPEG 1, Layer 3. So this is a MP3.
Most of you have seen it. It's been around forever. It compresses the file size down into a really
small size. And it's one of the earlier forms of audio encoding. And it's especially, you can fit
a lot of data onto a small disk. And so if you remember back in the days of when the internet
was first starting to come around and become popular, if you're that old like I am, you might
remember file trading sites, MP3 trading sites where you could trade MP3 files of music files.
And the reason that that worked is because they were small. And so one of the things, this is
probably the most popular way to use, to encode your files for podcasting. It's going to be,
it's going to be a most all podcast players are going to be able to play MP3 files.
One of the things that you are going to want to remember when you're encoding your files as an
MP3 is you do want to use a constant bit rate, not a variable bit rate. Some,
when you're editing your software, when you export it, you sometimes have the option to do CBR
or VBR constant bit rate or variable bit rate. And that is the way that it encodes it, depending
how much data is coming through it does a higher bit rate. And you want it to be consistently
the consistent bit rate. So that way, that way it, it just, it will work. Most players will handle
it funky and try to do, yeah, it just won't work well if you use a variable bit rate. So you don't
want to use variable bit rate. You want to use a constant bit rate or CBR. And you can encode it,
you know, for me, I encode it in mine in stereo. I wouldn't need to because I'm not necessarily
playing a, I'm not playing a track that's in stereo. So again, stereo being two different
tracks of audio, one left and one right. And you can have some audio on your left and some on your
right. And you can kind of switch between those. Now for me, I am not doing anything stereo that
needs to be stereo. And I am mostly just talking in my podcast. So for me, what I do though is I
am, I encode mine probably higher than I would need to. I do min at 128 KBS. And I do mine in
stereo. Now, if I wanted to cut my track down to be a whole lot smaller, I could, I could do that
into like 96 K. And I could go mono. Now again, that's going to have some effect on the music
that I am playing. The music won't quite sound as good as if I did it in 128 bit to 128 bit stereo
file. So I do mine 128 bit stereo, even though I'm mostly just doing talking, I still want to have
all of that information for me. Now again, I could cut that down and make it a lot smaller and make
it easier to digest. And I think that as a society, we've kind of forgotten that there are still
places that we don't get great internet. You know, in, in many of the places in my office, I get,
you know, two gig down or a gig down at gig up, like that's a lot of data and that happens very
fast. But in a lot of places around the world, we're, they're either paying for the amount of
data that they use. So the bigger the file it is, the more that your listeners are going to have to
pay. And so as podcasters, it's important that we remember that we should take advantage of that.
And maybe if we're not going to offer our main show in a smaller format, because maybe we don't
like the way that the music sounds or whatever, you can also still offer a lower bit rate file.
So that's the, how much, how many bits per second. And like I said, I normally do mine 128.
And I'm doing mine in stereo. But if I really wanted to cut it down, I could go to 96 or even
lower and then go to to mono because that's a lot less data for it to encode. So the pros of,
of MP3 is there's a couple of them. It's going to be widely compatible. Most of your, your podcast
platforms are going to play files as the MP3. They're going to, you know, this is like Spotify
and Apple podcasts and most other podcast apps are going to be playing in an MP3 format.
It's compact and it's convenient. And so you are going to be able to, you know, have that large,
large file that was your wave file and compress it down into something around a meg a minute if
you're using 128 bit stereo. Now the other, some other audio files out there, there's an AAC file,
which is advanced audio codec and it's, uh, uses a lossy compression encoder to reduce the file
size, but the better qualities than MP3s. But it is some of the, some the reasons I wouldn't use this
is that it's not quite widely as compatible with, with your podcasts apps. Now it is becoming a more,
a more of a standard, but it's still not all of your podcast apps are going to be able to play it.
So I would stay away from that and go with just with your MP3 because that's the tried and true.
That's the one we've been using for since the beginning days of podcasting. And, and so you,
again, you can, you can do that, but I would not do that because it's going to be, you might,
you just might not be able to get your places to the, the play it because you're going to run into,
to different, um, you're going to run into different issues there because not every podcast
player is going to be able to play your AAC file. So I would stick with something more traditional,
like an MP3 that is going to be, uh, and you can play around with it. I would try and play around
with it and see what the, the lowest bit rate that you can accept to your ears and produce it out.
Again, this is your file. This is your baby. This is your product. And so if you don't like the way
that 60K, 60, uh, the bit rate of 60 and this, uh, mono file sounds, don't do it, do it a little bit
higher. But again, there are people in the world that can't exactly pull all of that data down
because they keep just can't, they're the, the infrastructure doesn't handle it in the place,
in the world they're at. And you still want to be able to talk to them. I mean, this is the great
thing about the medium of podcasting is that anybody can do it, whether it's me who's been
doing podcasting for a while or somebody who's classically trained in radio or somebody who just
wants to get their word out or my son or my daughter who's never stepped behind a mic can go
and they can get it to, they can go ahead and put their content out really easily. And so that's
one of the things I really, really like about podcasting is because you can do that. Now guys,
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