File formats

Hey all,

For pre-production audio files I recommend using a lossless format. The reason for this is that between recording your audio and having it appear in the final podcast it will go through a reasonable number of trancodeing processes. After gathering all the files we'll normalise them. That gets them all to the same volume. They are then imported into an editor where we put things in order and save the whole thing off to a single file.

For the audio I would recommend FLAC. It's free. It's open source. It's lossless and it'll compress the file by 50-60%.

Who ever ends up working on the production of the final podcast (I would actually like to take that on myself) I would suggest Audacity for the task. It's free. It's open source. It just works. :) It's also available on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. So any production files that may need to be shared around aren't going to be tied to one platform or, more importantly, one proprietary application.

Some of the more observant of you may have spotted a theme here. I'm a big proponent of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) and would love to be able to promote this podcast as an example of what can be done using it. At this point everything to do with this site is running on FLOSS. The site is running on a free and open source CMS called Drupal. Drupal is written in a free and open source web scripting language called PHP and the data is stored in MySQL. MySQL is a free and open source database. PHP talks to MySQL and is called by a free and open source web server called Apache. All of this is running on a free and open source operating system(OS) called Ubuntu and this, in turn is build around the free and open source kernel called Linux.