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Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

marco.org

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Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#71

Post by viraptor »

Apreche wrote: post #7

That's not the only reason. We have been podcasting for over 10 years, and early on we tried to use VBR MP3s because we are teach people who know about that sort of thing. As it turns out, not everyone is listening using a modern device. When we tried VBR a significant number of people could not listen because their MP3 playing hardware/software of choice did not support VBR files properly. They didn't realize this w…

> When you make a podcast, maximum compatibility is the priority over audio quality and file size. So standard old MP3 it is.

Interesting how the incentives can be different. Stuck without proper broadband and paying for all the precious MBs for a few weeks I made a proxy for downloading/recoding podcasts as VBR on external server to save my data...

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#72

Post by slavik81 »

GavinMcG wrote: post #43
aianus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone storage and cellular bandwidth are still extremely expensive. Over $100 for a measly 16gb of storage or 4gb of LTE.

Is 16GB really that measly when it comes to podcasts? Even at, say, 128MB per hour (!) you've got over 100 hours of capacity there. Enough for a full waking week, nonstop.

Android takes up 6.5GB, the dozen-ish apps I use seem to take 3.5GB. So, that leaves 6GB of general storage. The browser cache and all music, photos and podcasts need to fit into those 6GB.

A single episode of a podcast may be an hour and a half. If you are subscribed to 5 weekly podcasts, then that's about 1GB of data you'll need. If you're going on a long trip, maybe you stock up. That might take 3GB or 4GB... But that probably won't fit on your phone. It certainly doesn't fit on mine.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#73

Post by anonova »

skrause wrote: post #30
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is AAC, regarding which a number of prominent podcasters introduced FUD several years ago and now the podcasting industry is reluctant to give up MP3 -- unlike pretty much every other audio-related industry in the world. Seriously, MP3 was on its way out the year the Backstreet Boys released that song, and it surprises me that people still stick to it despite the VBR thing being a shitty problem in softw…

The problem with AAC is in the container format, as Marco explains in his podcast: While some important metadata like chapter marks which a podcast player might want to display are within the first KB in an MP3 file, this same information is interleaved somewhere in the stream in AAC. Which means that you can't have all features when streaming an AAC file, in a time when streaming podcasts is getting more popular eve…

No, this is incorrect. It's up to the implementation of the muxer to determine where index information goes, which is typically at the end of the file. This is simply because writing a file is a single pass operation, and you don't know the contents of the atom until you've gone through the all the data for each stream. Many muxers provide an option to place it at the beginning of the file by adding padding and overwriting it afterward, which solves the progressive streaming problem.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#74

Post by yoda_sl »

anonova wrote: post #70

How does one actually see the bug report? What is `rdar://27848317` supposed to open?

This in reference to Apple internal bug tracking system named "Radar", the number listed here is the bug ID and only Apple folks and probably the person that created that bug in the Radar system can see it

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#76

Post by mattdonders »

mikey_p wrote: post #36

I assume this is the same problem I see in my car (VW) when streaming Spotify via Bluetooth? The progress bar in the car seems to go at double speed and runs out about halfway through each track.

I thought so too but it's actually a bug in the radio itself (if you're driving a MK6).

You can go to the dealer and reference Technical Service Bulletin (TSB) 91-13-03 and they'll do a software update to fix it.

--- There's another bug in that radio but I won't tell you until after you see if you want to get it fixed because its really annoying.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#77

Post by ksec »

Not a fans of VBR MP3. VBR is great. But as some has shared maximum compatibility is much more important. Let's do some maths ( Correct me if I am wrong )

At 128Kbps that is 1MB per minutes, an hour would means 60MB. Since most podcast uses 64Kbps we are talking about 30Mb, a saving of 20% means 6MB per client, 10,000 listeners saves you 60GB per episode, assuming a Weekly episode, that is 240GB....... on an 2015 Est of ATP listeners around 80,000, that is ~ 2TB of Transfer. That is the transfer a $10 Linode would give you.

So is it really worth the risk of VBR concern on a little saving worth $10 to $20?

Since i didn't exactly listen to the podcast, I wonder what problem does he has with AAC. Because the argument about most having a newer devices with proper support for VBR MP3 also works for AAC. And AAC sounds A LOT better.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#78

Post by et-al »

ksec wrote: post #77

Not a fans of VBR MP3. VBR is great. But as some has shared maximum compatibility is much more important. Let's do some maths ( Correct me if I am wrong ) At 128Kbps that is 1MB per minutes, an hour would means 60MB. Since most podcast uses 64Kbps we are talking about 30Mb, a saving of 20% means 6MB per client, 10,000 listeners saves you 60GB per episode, assuming a Weekly episode, that is 240GB....... on an 2015 Est…

You raise a good point, but if you're ever in a place with a shoddy internet connection, you appreciate optimized filesizes.

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#79

Post by ghshephard »

archagon wrote: post #16
Analemma_ wrote: post #4

If you want more context to this, there's a lot more in the most recent ATP podcast (with timestamp link included in the article). Which kind of highlights a problem that I think is only going to grow over time - the general greatness of podcasts has one big black spot in that they're tough to share. I've seen so many discussions recently where there was awesome additional context or info in a recent podcast, but it…

I just don't understand why Marco has bitten so hard into this problem. It doesn't matter at all . Everybody skips the ATP theme song anyway, and VBR will only negligibly improve quality of the rest of the show ( as Marco himself has pointed out ). And it's not like the theme song sounds bad in its current state! I have never noticed any artifacts or flaws in the recording at all. This is almost literally only someth…

Theme song by Michael Mann is one of the highlights of the podcast for me (Up there with finding out if Casey Liss's iMac is still crashing) - and, regardless of where I am in the world, I always enjoy singing along to it - though I do moderate if there are people around me; I have never once even been tempted to skip it, and any effort that goes into enhancing it is effort well spent (at least for this audience of one).

Re: Why don’t podcasts use VBR MP3s? Because iOS and macOS don’t accurately seek them

#80

Post by ghshephard »

archagon wrote: post #22
cjensen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ATP theme song by Johnathan Mann is unexpectedly awesome, and I never ever skip it. And as Marco pointed out in the ATP episode, this also affects any musical interludes or short musical samples within any podcast.

Yeah, I'm sure lots of people listen to it all the way through. I did for a while myself. But it's not worth inconveniencing so many of your listeners just to make your theme song (or very occasional clips) sound a tiny bit better — especially considering the fact that most people listen to podcasts in their car or even through the iPhone speaker, as Marco himself discovered from his analytics. Others have already no…

"a 1.3x size increase is really not that big of a big deal" - you say this about Marco "All my image resources are vectors so the OverCast App is 5 Megabytes large" Arment? For the same reason that UTF-8 is awesome, VBR podcasts are likewise a perfect system, presuming we can get over the chapter marking hurdles.
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