Blubrry Podcasting Community Forum
Hey Blubrry => Help Me Out => Topic started by: akat on September 07, 2010, 08:06:38 pm
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Hi,
So I'm referring to this warning / guidline:
Blubrry PowerPress checks that your mp3 media is either in ‘stereo’ or ‘joint stereo’ for maximum player compatibility.
Web (Flash) based media players and some portable media players require either ‘Stereo’ or ‘Joint Stereo’ for proper playback. Playback typically fails instantly in players that do not support ‘Mono’. To reach the widest audience possible, we recommend using ‘Joint Stereo’ when creating your mp3 media. Joint Stereo and Mono result in the same file size, so switching from ‘Mono’ to ‘Joint Stereo’ should not be an issue if file size is a concern.
Values other than these noted may result in media files that are not compatible with some media players and web flash players.
I have mono recordings of a spoken voice in a mic, and when I use iTunes to compress to mp3 the file is TWICE the size if I force them to be stereo than if I make it mono. (Contrary to the statement above -- I mean, stereo is twice the info so this makes sense). What's more, the mono files play just fine in the Blubrry player and on iTunes! They play, they download, they act like good mp3 files. So . . . is that an old issue? Do I really need to make my files stereo even if they're mono recordings . . . and playing fine? Am I missing some Windows issues here in my blissful world of Mac?
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Still an issue, though small. This is a warning we print for your convenience, you can ignore it if you want to continue to make mono files. Warnings can be ignored, errors will prevent you from publishing.
Mono mp3s will not play in older first generation iPods and other budget/low end mp3 players. It will also not play on computers that have older versions of Flash installed.
If you are using a high end audio editing product, you can save your audio in "joint stereo" and it should give you the same file size as a mono file. Anything using the LAME encoder to create the mp3 will split the mono into 2 channels and double the file size as you noted.
The warning is there so you know that if you do get a complaint from a listener, you know why. Before we had the warning we had numbers of support tickets from podcasters that would receive complaints from their listeners that their audio would not play.
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Thanks, Angelo, I just saw this. Makes sense.
Now I know iTunes is a LAME encoder! :)
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If you are using the newest version of lame in Audacity, you can select VBR quaility 5 and the file size of joint stereo will be the same as the mono file. Took some tweaking but it works great. Check out "the audacity to podcast" and in one of his episodes, he describes how to setup for Joint Stereo. I think it's #3 or 4.
-Mike