New website…maybe

I listen to this fellow named Dan Miller. He’s a pretty smart guy and has some great insight in helping me to find the work I love. As such, I registered a new domain name: http://www.48dayspodcast.com. I’m a pretty picky person when it comes to audio quality so I “remastered” Dan Miller’s podcasts for my own personal use. Yet, I really want to share them with others, so I asked Mr. Miller if he would permit me to do so; if not, I’ll just create a site that basically links back to 48 Days.

TECHNICAL GIBBERISH

So, I said that I am pretty picky when it comes to audio quality. Yes, that’s true, but there are also some caveats. Mr. Miller’s 48days podcasts are recorded in stereo at an incredibly high bitrate, (I think the highest was 128kbps), for the content of the podcast. First of all, it’s a talk show, any music that is heard is not really important so we can knock the recording down to about 40kbps. Secondly, it’s a talk show, why is it recorded in stereo? Who knows, but that’s certainly more than is needed, so that can be downsampled to mono. Finally, it’s a talk show, any frequencies outside of the vocal range are unnecessary, so we can do a low-pass filter at about 8kHz (this would capture ~99.9% of people who call in as well); so, unless we get a pipsqueak…it works. Plus, some of the original podcast recordings sound awful, well only one does, but still…so I cleaned it up. I concatenated the segmented shows so that each broadcast consumes only one mp3. The result: mp3’s that are about 50% smaller than the original, but keeps all the important stuff without crapping out the sound.