Richard Farrar’s Blog

The first time you meet someone new one of their opening questions is likely to be “What do you do?” The answer to which is only ever expected to be singular.

Why, in such a supposedly enlightened and forward thinking society, is it assumed that we can only do or excel at a single thing? Isn’t this limiting our natural potential by conditioning everybody to think they can only be good at one thing?

Based on your answer to the above question, you are likely to be stereotyped and pigeon holed by your newly met acquaintance, and will probably have to work very hard to convince them otherwise of your multifaceted personality.

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Album art can be embedded into MP3 files fairly easily using ID3 tags. However, before you start filling up all of your MP3 files with works of art, there are a few things that you should stop to consider first.

While MP3 files were not originally intended to store additional metadata within them, the release of the ID3 tag protocol in 1996 suddenly made this a possibility. However, it wasn’t until version 2 of the protocol became available that MP3 files could actually contain embedded album art.

So, before you start cutting and pasting huge graphics and adding them into your collection of MP3 tracks, what do you need to consider to avert potential disaster?

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MP3 files usually contain track data embedded within the file in addition to the audio data. This additional data is contained in ID3 tags and typically include the track’s title, artist and album details. However, these tags are much more versatile and can also contain a lot of extra information about the file in question.

A plain MP3 file just contains audio data with no further information about the artist or type of audio contained within it. To be able to include such additional data in an MP3, tag data is usually added to either the beginning or end of the audio file in an ID3 format.

While the original ID3 specification was quite limited with regards to the information that it could store about a file, later versions allow for great flexibility in the type and amount of data that can be stored.

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Podcasts are becoming an increasingly popular communication medium, but if you’re thinking of producing a podcast, how do you choose the best bit rate for your podcast and what are the factors to consider in making your decision?

The choice of bit rate for a podcast can be a bit of a balancing act. On the one hand, having high bit rates will give higher perceived audio quality, whilst on the other, they will lead to larger file sizes and hence longer download times for your listeners. So how do you make the right choice?

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While structured articles may not be appropriate to every blog, the vast majority of blogs will undoubtedly benefit from having a definite article structure, easing readability, improving general reader engagement and even helping you during the writing process.

Writing a blog post or web article is not that dissimilar to writing any other sort of article, and as such many of the same writing principles remain. To communicate your thoughts in cohesive and coherent fashion, and capture the reader’s attention, your articles really need to follow a defined structure. A good article structure will help readability and enable you to get your point across better.

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