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Everyday Podcasting

iTunes’ Podcast Setting

Recently while encoding a CD I noticed that the new iTunes 4.9 now has a setting for Podcasts under the AAC(Advanced Audio Codec) codec. This of course is a little cheeky in that you can only play podcasts encoded with Apple’s AAC on iPods. I would imagine the quality of the recordings is superb, but the loss in market you will get only encoding for iPods makes it a bad choice… I would recommend all you Podcasters to stay away from this setting if possible.

!(photo)https://www.upthetree.com/wp-uploads/encoding.jpg(encoding settings)!

3 replies on “iTunes’ Podcast Setting”

I noticed the AAC encoding deal, which allows you to compress more songs onto an iPod (cramming 5000 songs onto a 20GB iPod necessitates this) – my question is: if you import songs with AAC, then fold them into an MP3 that doesn't get encoded, will this still preclude the general market from hearing your podcast?

Hmm, what do you mean "fold them into an MP3 that doesn't get encoded"? You unfortunately can't fold an AAC(Advanced Audio Codec) into an MP3 as the technologies used are not compatible.

The general market is the iPod folks as they make up 75% of the MP3 market share, but I'm just not ready to tell those without iPods to go away. MP3 on the other hand works for 100% of Mp3 players! Although the sound quality is not as good as AAC and the file sizes are much smaller at higher quality for AAC the con of not allowing people to listen to the show is unacceptable.

Thanks for the quick response, Ben. I just took a closer look at my set-up and haven't actually used any of the files that were encoded via AAC (I see that it generates an .m4a file) for podcasting. I was under the impression that files dragged into iTunes would be encoded in the same way as CDs that were imported, but I see that they retain their format. So, if I take an .mp3 that I've converted from .aiff in, let's say Peak, and then drag this into iTunes, load up the ID3 tag with images and text, then upload the file, everything should be good for the mass market? Thanks for your patience, I'm new at this!

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