Podcast sound quality comprimised

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Level 3

940 points

Podcast sound quality comprimised

Hi, I'm producing a podcast and am having an issue with the quality.

I am producing an all audio podcast over Skype where I am hosting and recording into Garageband. During the recording everything sounds great. But when playing it back on Garage band I notice that the S sounds aren't hitting, they are a bit muffled. I take the next step and export the file as an .mp3 as a 'spoken' podcast and using the default settings. The s sounds are even worse. I tried taking the mp3 compression settings to 160kbps and it sounds a bit better but my file is starting to get a little large (twice as big from the default compression setting).

Is there any way of getting the s sounds to sound better without making an enormously huge file?

Thanks for any help.

2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Dec 9, 2010 1:16 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 9, 2010 2:57 PM in response to budakhan

There's always going to be a slight hit on the quality when you move to MP3, and 160kb/s (stereo) is about on the edge of it for speech. As you reduce the bitrate you will tend to get a sort of watery, hollow sound (it's a useful experiment to make a version with a very low bitrate so you can hear an exaggerated version of the effect; it will help you know what exactly to listen out for).

The initial recording in GarageBand, before you export it as an MP3, shouldn't deteriorate the quality: check that you don't have any effects in place such as limiting or dynamic compression.

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Answer 2

budakhan Author

Level 3

940 points

Dec 9, 2010 4:48 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Thanks for your reply. I also wanted to know if this sounds normal. Is 160kbps too large for an audio podcast? I'm getting 40+ MB for a half hour show and I feel that might be too much for my audience to download. Would I have better luck with AAC?

I know it sounds lame that I'm not doing this myself right now. I am away from my production computer and am trying to find answers before I get to it.

I'll post my website. Episode 001 will remain and has the same compression issue as 002. But I will be re-posting 002 periodically for testing.

[www.askadamleague.com]

Thanks very much for your help.

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Answer 3

Dec 9, 2010 11:37 PM in response to budakhan

40MB isn't unusual and it's no great size for someone with a half-decent broadband connection - it's only going to take 3-5 minutes in most cases. For myself, I would have tended to aim for 192kb/s.

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