What Bitrate should my Podcast be

[jamesdelfresco]

I am getting ready to record my first podcast and was wondering what biterate the audio should be at. I know music is good at 128kbps but i am not too sure about audio. thank you

[sunkast]

If its just speech, 64kbps will do. These days however, people are doing 96 and 128kbps more and more. You may also want to take into consideration where you will having your podcast hosted, and how much storage and bandwidth you are limited to. The higher the bitrate, the larger the file you will have to store, and the more bandwidth it will take.

[andrewzarian]

I think 96k is a great place to start. You can evaluate where your viewers are coming from. If its mostly mobile you should consider going to 64k. If people are downloading at home 128kbps wouldn't be an issue. We recently upgraded to 96Kbps and have noticed a big difference in audio quality.

It also might be worth looking to having 2 feeds. One for mobile and one for higher quality audio.

[mcphillips]

Your podcast should be recorded at 16 bit, 44.1 or 48 kHz. When you're done editing it, you can convert it to MP3 at a suitable bitrate. Don't record direct to MP3.

[andrewzarian]

Mike are you saying that it should be recorded as a Wav File then converted over to MP3

[mcphillips]

Yes, Andrew. Audio should be recorded in an uncompressed format. For PC, it's wav. I don't know what it is on a Mac. With the file being uncompressed, the quality is higher, and the file can be natively edited in Audacity, Audition, or whatever software is used. When editing is complete, the uncompressed file is converted to MP3.