The Beastie Boys are one of my favorite bands of all time. Besides the classic Licensed to Ill album (1986), I especially like Check Your Head (1992) and Ill Communication (1994). This is the “So What’cha Want” music video from Check Your Head.
Podcasts are great. Hard drives are large. But for non-music podcasts, why waste bandwidth, download time, and disk storage with an MP3 encoded at anything more than 32kbps 22khz? Just so the intro song comes in stereo? I say no!
I have an iPod Nano, and it’s “only” 2 Gigs of storage. To some it may seem like a lot of space, and to some it may seem very limited. Either way, I like to squeeze as much music onto it as possible. When I put several 45-minute non-music podcasts that are encoded at a high rate (such as 64kbps 44khz), it sure starts to take a lot of room. The non-music podcasts are usually technical podcasts with just dialog, and a real high quality is just not needed. It’s like driving a Ford Shelby GT 25MPH to the corner store–what a waste! And using smaller MP3 files also saves on internet bandwidth.
The Web Axe podcast is a technical podcast that I run, and it is mostly dialog. I encode at 32kbps 22khz, and each podcast files runs about 3-7MB each. At this rate, the download is very fast, and you can store all 44 episodes one on flash drive! So it ain’t the greatest quality, but I think it’s manageable and user-friendly.
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