I'm producing The New Capital Show on Pacifica Radio KPFT Houston, nowadays, and need to provide archives of the shows to place on www.newcapitalshow.com . Currently, KPFT provides a high density WAV file that is roughly 620 MB per hour-long show. These are what I burn to disk. They also provide low quality versions at 10 MBs for listeners to download at their leisure. These are what are currently ftp'd to the New Capital Show website. I'd like to compress my own version for listener downloads and use the original WAV as the source. I could use advice on recommended A/V codec's, shareware A/V editors that support said codecs, any recommended filters, etc. I can do the compression/filtering on either Windows or Linux machines....command-line or GUI. thx
Wasn't that station recently on the news for getting shot at? Maybe you should look for work elsewhere
Best answer, any other compresssion is going to require that the people you are trying to get to download the stuff have the codec installed. MP3 is the safest bet, IMO. DD
the current low density ones auto-generated by KPFT are mp3, and they suck as downloadable versions of the show. Then again, maybe whoever makes them is doing it wrong???
i don't consider this a problem. We want best quality/compression I can get. We can always provide the crappy 10MB mp3 for download as well.
My dictation recorder uses a standard called DSS (Digital Speech Standard) that records two hours of high quality speech to about a 10 meg file. Since DSS is optimized for speech, the quality to compression ratio is outstanding. Outside of dictation recorders, however, I'm not sure the standard is used anywhere else, so I don't have much other information.
The encoder also has a lot to do with the quality. If they are using a stock encoder in a consumer software package chances are it is fairly poor quality even when on a less compressed setting. There are several types of codecs that are higher quality than mp3's regardless of amount of compression but they aren't as universal on the end user side of things - so mp3 is still probably the best choice. The Lame codec is my second personal favorite mp3 encoder in regards to quality. My first favorite is too expensive an option in regards to simply using it to encode mp3's. There are also tricks that you can do to audio before you encode to mp3 to compensate for some of the artifacts that are left after encoding - but that is a much longer discussion.
