Archive for December 9th, 2004

TechnologyTalks is an Internet business servicing the Information Technology sector in Australia and New Zealand. Our product is centralised IT events registration, along with post-event downloadable audio and visual materials in a choice of formats for those unable to attend. The full range of IT events relevant to the region will be covered – conferences, seminars, motivational topics – from which we will produce high quality digital recordings and transcripts.

I’m flattered that they (or anyone) would see IT Conversations as competition:

In the final weeks of our business plan we found one website that offers a product similar to what we plan to offer. ITConversations offers audio and transcripts of “interviews and important events” for the IT Industry, they produce these for O’Reilly’s Conferences and for a variety of other non-conference IT groups and they principally focus on the US market/Internet businesses. They have a well planned site, their content is free because much of it is open-source or readily available material and some cool value adds. Whilst this group do a great job [Boioioing!!] and we have learned something from them we do not see them as a direct competitor because our sole market is conferences and seminars (whilst they are broader in scope yet advertise only one group’s conferences).

Update: Apolon Ivankovic dug deeper than I did and may have uncovered that there’s nothing behind this. Curiouser and cusriouser.

(This also applies to anyone submitting recordings to IT Conversations.)

Solid-state portable audio recorders are relatively new in the consumer market, and many people are now using them to record podcasts and conference presentations. While these devices are undoubtedly convenient and can store a lot of audio in MP3 format, they’ve introduced a new problem.

Like JPEG, MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, and the effect of repeated encode/decode operations creates some nasty sounding artifacts. Furthermore MP3 is designed as a final encoding technique: The only decode operation should be playback and rendering as sound. You should never encode audio as MP3 unless and until it’s in its final form.

A problem arises when you want to edit an MP3 recording, even just to trim off a few seconds at the head or tail of the file. If you use any computer-based software like Audacity or SoundForge to edit, the MP3 will first be decoded to an internal uncompressed format whe you open the file, but this will not recover the audio lost in that first encoding operation. When you’re done editing, you’ll have to re-encode, and the sound quality will be significantly worse than what your started with.

If you have one of these portable recorders and want to be able to edit your files, or if you plan to submit your audio to IT Conversations, here are some guidelines:

1. If possible record and save in uncompressed in WAV format. I use 24 bits and 48,000 samples per second in the studio, but you can use 16/48,000, 16/44,100 or even 16/22,050 and get pretty good results if you keep your levels up.

2. If you must record or send a compressed file, encode using a much higher bit rate than the final audio. For example, IT Conversations MP3s are encoded at 64kbps. If you send me an MP3 that you’ve recorded and/or encoded at 128kbps, the improvement in quality will be substantial. In particular, the artifacts that you get when you encode at 64kbps then decode/re-encode at the same rate will be far less annoying if I start with your 128kbps version. If you encode at 192kbps or higher, the artifacts will essentially be gone.

If you can only send me a 64kbps MP3, the final 64kbps will sound about the same as a 32kbps original, and there’s a good chance I won’t be able to use it.