What is the best Bitrate for Audio only podcasts?

[Podnutter]

What Bitrate should I be recording my shows at? I have seen people do 32k all the way to 256k? Is there a perfect bitrate?

[andrewzarian]

I would generally stay between 64 and 128. It also depends if your listeners are listening to your show via Mobile .

[Dahalabit]

Is there a significant difference between 96k and 128k

[andrewzarian]

Depends. Are you playing music or just talk ?

[Podnutter]

thank you Andrew! Does it matter if its streaming audio or if its a downloadable mp3?

[andrewzarian]

As far as a stream goes I would go with 64k MP3. Downloadable content can be up to 96k MP3

[sunkast]

What Bitrate should I be recording my shows at? I have seen people do 32k all the way to 256k? Is there a perfect bitrate?

When you record, I would recommend at least 256. The keyword here is recording. Having a master quality at a high bit rate is really nice because after you record, you can transcode the bit rate to whatever you would like. Whether it be 64, 96, or 128. This is also great for having a nice high quality archive version of your show. And later if you end up moving to a higher bit rate, you can have a higher bit rate for all of your past shows.

Recording at a higher bit rate gives you the flexibility to distribute your show in whatever bit rate you'd like.

[Podnutter]

Thank you Sunkast!

[Donovan]

I record in 44.1kHz mono WAVE and then compress the final version down to 80kbps mono. I'm an oddball, I guess, because I found that I liked 80kbps as a middle ground. I agree with Sunkast that your original should be the highest bitrate that you can achieve - which is why I use WAVE. It's uncompressed; can't get higher than that.

[andrewzarian]

at one point we were recording our audio in garageband. We stopped doing it that way when we added more shows. We currently rip the audio from our video recordings