(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Mike Milinkovich – Eclipse Foundation (rated 2.8 by our listeners)
• Peter Hortensius – Lenovo (3.0)
• Dean Karnazes – Ultramarathoner (3.2)
• Richard Marks – Interactive Entertainment User Interfaces (3.4)
• Dan Solove – The Digital Person (3.4)
• Jerry Sanders on Biotech Nation (3.6)
• Stephen Yafa – "Cotton" on Tech Nation (3.7)
• George Dyson – Von Neuman’s Universe (4.1)
• Dave Van Dyke – Changes in Radio (4.2)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• Bruce Schneier: Beyond Fear (4.0)

Earlier today we passed the milestone of 10,000 registered users on IT Conversations. Since most of our downloads come in anonymously through RSS and other mechanisms, there’s no way to be sure of the ratio of registered-to-non-registered listeners. But if the ratio is the same as that for those who download/stream through the site, our total active listenership (at least one download/stream per month) is between 80,000 and 100,000.

Podcasting has made it into EQ Magazine, one of the better tech publications for recording engineers, etc. In this article by Brian Maggi, he concludes:

Podcasting is real and here, not some vaporware. And yet, some are still going to miss the boat. They won’t recognize its boundless promotional potential, or appreciate the tangible connections it will create with new and existing audio fans.

So you have a choice: Dismiss it now, fear it later, or take this golden opportunity to define and shape it for the better.

Includes the usual mentions of Adam Curry, iPodder.org and Dawn and Drew.

Some of you have heard me preach/predict that the future of podcasting will be reception by autonomous mobile decvices: when you can both manage your RSS/enclosure subscriptions on a wireless mobile device, receive them asynchronously (i.e., not streamed for listening in real time), and cache them on local disk. All without ever using a desktop or notebook computer as we all do now. The new Nokia N91 looks like it might be able to do this given an appropriate application. Expect the other handset manufacturers to offer similar hardware by the end of this year.

(Hear the MP3 version in beautiful monophonic audio.)

New Programs This Week

Listed in increasing order of listener rating. For descriptions, visit the IT Conversations home page.

• Sound Policy: Corporate Blogging (rated 2.8 by listeners)
• The Architecture of Participation (3.0)
• Tom Igoe – Networked Objects at ITP (3.3)
• Rebecca Goldstein – Tech Nation (3.5)
• Gordon Moore – Moore’s Law, 40 Years Later (3.6)
• Jonathan Schwartz – The Participation Age (3.7)
• Keith Devlin – Tech Nation (3.8)

This week’s Doug’s Favorite from the IT Conversations archives:

• R0ml Lefkowitz: (More) Missing Open Source Projects (3.4)

I’ve previously ranted about the use of MP3 for anything but final delivery, and here at IT Conversations, Team ITC has been experimenting with the best codec to use for exchanging in-progress audio files. Under consideration have been:

1. MPEG-1 Lauer III (MP3, at 192kbps or 256kbps)
2. MPEG-1 Layer II
3. MPEG-2
4. FLAC (lossless)

We’ve been using MPEG-1 Layer II (MP2) based on my own empirical tests in which I encoded a WAV/PCM original using one of the above, then decoded and re-encoded using MP3 for release. Using MP3 (even hi-res) causes annoying artifacts when decoded/re-encoded. FLAC doesn’t offer much compression, although the audio is perfect. MPEG-2 has a boatload of options, and the ones I tested weren’t any better than hi-res MP3. (I didn’t test them all.)

I then went out and got some advice fom the real experts in public radio. Here are some excerpts from their comments. Stephen Hill wrote:

The quick answer is MP2…[When] the MPEG 1 spec was designed, precisely the problems you are facing were addressed. The solution was a 3 tier system for origination, production, and release formats, which correspond to Layers 1, 2 and 3. Layer 2 is an intermediate production format specifically designed to limit artifacts when re-encoded or transcoded into the final Level 3 release format. You are correct that NPR standardized on MPEG-1 Layer II at 128kbps (mono) or 256kbps (stereo) some ten years ago, and continues to use them today. The latest distribution architecture which they call the ContentDepot, is built on this. You can see the details at http://www.prss.org.

Steve Schultze of prx.org had this to say:

Basically MP2 survives much better than other codecs when reencoded. In codec-greek MP2 is recommended for “contribution (i.e. link between broadcasting studios with provisions for post processing)” vs. MP3 which is only recommended for “commentary links, i.e. a link for speech signals which are transmitted to the broadcasting station using e.g. one B-channel of an ISDN line.” Read about it here if you’re so inclined.

NPR came to the same conclusion: “Now NPR does not accept audio feeds in MP3 format, because employing this algorithm can lead to degraded audio in fewer generations than does high-bit rate MPEG Layer II.”

For PRX we chose MP2 at 128kbps mono / 256 stereo because it can be used fairly reliably for re-encoding later, is 1/5 the size of an uncompressed WAV, and it is the NPR standard. We generate Real and MP3 files from these MP2s and will likely create Windows Media, AAC and others in the future. Our producers would not have been able to reliably upload hour long WAVs (~600mb) even on broadband connections.

FLAC is non-lossy and is about %60 the size of the WAV, so that’s an option worth considering. However…MP2 would make it easier to get into the radio broadcast chain. Also, FLAC is less widely supported in sound editing software (MP2 *should* work in anything that supports MP3s although that’s not always true) and MP2s can be played in iTunes etc for convenience. MP2s at 256kbps are also still ~half the size of FLAC. If you settle on MP2 then you could give your producers/engineers our mp2 encoder which is drag-and drop with no settings, meaning that everyone is using the same standard.

MPEG 2 frankly still confuses the heck out of me because of the varied video/audio layers and settings.

For our purposes, it ultimately made sense to go with MPEG-1 Layer II as our “archive” and “interchange” format. It sounds like one of the better options for you.

Via one of the podcast email lists I found out about Podscope, a very cool site that searches the audio content of podcasts. Hey…I’m not kidding. It’s pretty cool. Check out this link for China, then click on the + sign to the left of Oded Shenkar: Tech Nation. David Seltzer is the Systems Architect at TVEyes, the company whose technology is behind the scenes.

I was visiting Evan, Noah and the Odeo team this afternoon, and we kicked it around a bit. Evan did some further investigations and explains it well.

Last Friday I had the privilege of being a guest on the Charlotte Talks radio program on WFAE with Mike Collins. The show was about blogs and podcasting. Also on the show were Steve Rubel and Haney Howell from Winthrop University. You can listen to the show. (Windows Media Player required.)

Thanks to an invitation and ticket from Niall Kennedy of Technorati, I’m going to hear Ira Glass speak in Redwood City, CA, on Friday night. If anyone else wants to go and join us for dinner beore the show, just get in touch with either of us.