Richard Farrar’s Blog

Web addresses can often be rather long and cumbersome, which may work fine in print, but don’t necessarily translate well to the spoken word. So what is the best strategy to handle URLs in podcasts?

How often have you received an e-mail from a friend or colleague that contains a link to an interesting web page, where the link spans two or three lines of the e-mail and contains all sorts of seemingly random numbers and characters? Quite often I suspect.

Accessing these sorts of links in an e-mail is really easy; just click on the link and bosh, you’re off to the website in question. However, if you had to speak the web address over the phone for example, it would be another matter entirely. So what is the best way to approach this problem of pronouncing web addresses in podcasts or via the spoken word?

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While the terms mono and stereo are probably familiar to most people, the term joint stereo is certainly much less common. So when is stereo not stereo?

Most of the music that you listen to today is likely to have been recorded and designed for playback on a stereo system, either through a pair of headphones or a pair of speakers. Even very cheap portable systems nowadays are just as likely to include two speakers for stereo playback as they are a single one.

So if the days of mono systems are all but over, what’s this joint stereo nonsense all about? Is this a retrograde step or something altogether more cunning?

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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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