Richard Farrar’s Blog

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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Have you ever wondered what a podcast actually is and how it differs from a plain MP3 track? If so, then this article should shed some light on the matter.

In our quest to dissect the true nature of a podcast, it may first be helpful to understand the origins of the word itself. Podcast is actually a combination of two words; iPod and broadcast. Knowing the derivation of the word should give us a clue as to what a podcast is, and by association, what podcasting is all about.

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If you’re considering buying an MP3 player, or are just wondering how much of your music collection will fit on to one, then this little utility could be just what you’re looking for.

The memory, or storage capacity, of an MP3 player is usually measured in GB (Giga Bytes), or MB (Mega Bytes) for the smaller/older players. However, the number of songs that your MP3 player can potentially store is not only determined by its memory capacity, but also by the bit rate of your MP3 tracks.

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When people talk about MP3 files and the like, you often hear the term Bit Rate also mentioned, so what’s it all about?

Until the mid 1980s, commercially purchased music was always in analogue format, be it typically vinyl or cassette. In late 1982, the arrival of the now ubiquitous compact disc (CD), co-developed by Sony and Philips, changed all that and revolutionised how we listen to music.

Digitisation

In order to create digital recordings such as CDs, the conventional analogue audio first has to be digitised. The process of digitisation takes the original audio source and chops it up into lots of thin slices. Each slice represents the volume of the audio source for a particular point in time. A digital number then stores the volume level of this slice on the CD. Each slice, or sample as it’s actually called, represents the level of the audio for a mere 23?s (23 millionths of a second).

To reconstitute the audio track, all of these samples are stuck together and the volume level of each sample is sent out to your speakers every 23?s (in the case of CDs). It’s a bit like slicing a loaf of bread and then squeezing all of the slices of bread together again to make it look like the original loaf. Not perfect, but if you squint, you’d never know that difference. CDs are very similar, because the slices are so thin, you don’t know the difference.

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