MP3 bit rates for podcasting

[JeffReckart]

Hey, folks!

I have recently started ripping our sermons, which are recorded to cd, to MP3's for posting to our website.
I rip using WMP to a wav file, drop it in CN Levelator, and use Audacity to trim start/stop, exporting as MP3. My 35 min mp3 is about 33 MB, @ 128 Kbps bit rate.

My question is other than recording straight to Hd with audacity, what other tips and tricks do you guys have? Also, what is the best combo of bitrates/filesizes do you guys recommend?

JeffReckart

[dstatler]

What we do, since the podcast is just the sermon part, we make it mono instead of stereo which helps cut down the filesize. Then we use a bitrate of 40 Kbps. Last week's sermon was 47 minutes and has a filesize of 13.5 MB.

Hope that helps!
David

[[Admin] osborn4]

For speech, make sure you are encoding your MP3s as mono. That should help drop the size. And you may be able to drop your bitrate to 96. A lot of podcasts I listen to use that. Adjust the bit-rate down until you don't like the outcome and the push it back up one notch.

Another nice touch is to have some sort of recorded intro and outro. Something instrumental with an announcer introducing the topic and speaker, date, whatever else might be appropriate. Nothing elaborate, just some thing to make it a bit more polished. Maybe 10-15 seconds long.

[bpalermini]

Originally Posted by osborn4

For speech, make sure you are encoding your MP3s as mono. That should help drop the size. And you may be able to drop your bitrate to 96. A lot of podcasts I listen to use that. Adjust the bit-rate down until you don't like the outcome and the push it back up one notch.

Another nice touch is to have some sort of recorded intro and outro. Something instrumental with an announcer introducing the topic and speaker, date, whatever else might be appropriate. Nothing elaborate, just some thing to make it a bit more polished. Maybe 10-15 seconds long.

What he said!

Ours are 96 kbps, mono, about 14 MB for a 20-25 minute sermon with a short intro added.

[prochlea]

I do mono (i think) at 64kbps, and our 45 minute sermons sound just fine and are about 20MB.

[Chkurgrnd]

I rip it off of the CD using Smart CD ripper (fantastic sound quality, around $20... other's I've tried seem to color it somehow) then run it thru Audacity and export as an MP3.

The last one was 37 mins and in stereo it's just under 40MB. We save this @ 128Kbps in another archive since the CD is raw, unedited audio. We upload it to sermon.net and they allow bits of 32 and 64. 64 is good enough for the spoken word w/o garbling but I'm not sure what the size is from there...