Jimmy Akin

Get set! . . . For more technobabble than you’ve heard since Capt. Janeway left the airwaves.

Here’s the deal:

Though there have been brief discussions of the subject before before, as of yesterday making Catholic Answers Live available in .mp3 format is under active exploration.

So is podcasting it.

So is tagging the show with questions, as we’ve been doing via the volunteer program.

One of the first things we’ve got to settle is what level of compression we’ll use in .mp3 format. Since this is a talk show rather than a music show, we can get away with a fairly high level of compression and thus make the shows easier to download, easier to fit more of them on your listening device, etc.

But there’s a problem: Each show is an hour long, and that’s a lot of time, so even at moderate compression ratios, the show might end up taking up a lot of space (e.g., 20 mb). If we go smaller than that (which we can do) then we risk causing a problem with the user’s ability to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs (which use the .wav format) out of the .mp3s.

This means: You couldn’t take the .mp3 and turn it into an ordinary CD and plop it into an ordinary CD player and have it work. (You could, however, burn it to a CD and then put the CD into an .mp3-equipt CD player, like the one I recently had put in my pickup.)

The question is: How many people really want to be able to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs out of the show versus how many want to use it in .mp3 format?

Also: How many want us to retain the RealAudio format versus how many would be willing to switch over to .mp3?

One final question: For transitioning our library of past shows, does anybody have recommendations of programs that would allow us to easily batch-convert our current .ra/.rm and .wav files to .mp3?

(I’m asking these questions here because the radio manager knew I had people on the blog talking about these issues and wanted to get a better sense of what folks wanted, so a little market research was in order.)

Thanks much, folks!

Get set! . . . For more technobabble than you’ve heard since Capt. Janeway left the airwaves.

Here’s the deal:

Though there have been brief discussions of the subject before before, as of yesterday making Catholic Answers Live available in .mp3 format is under active exploration.

So is podcasting it.

So is tagging the show with questions, as we’ve been doing via the volunteer program.

One of the first things we’ve got to settle is what level of compression we’ll use in .mp3 format. Since this is a talk show rather than a music show, we can get away with a fairly high level of compression and thus make the shows easier to download, easier to fit more of them on your listening device, etc.

But there’s a problem: Each show is an hour long, and that’s a lot of time, so even at moderate compression ratios, the show might end up taking up a lot of space (e.g., 20 mb). If we go smaller than that (which we can do) then we risk causing a problem with the user’s ability to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs (which use the .wav format) out of the .mp3s.

This means: You couldn’t take the .mp3 and turn it into an ordinary CD and plop it into an ordinary CD player and have it work. (You could, however, burn it to a CD and then put the CD into an .mp3-equipt CD player, like the one I recently had put in my pickup.)

The question is: How many people really want to be able to reverse-engineer ordinary CDs out of the show versus how many want to use it in .mp3 format?

Also: How many want us to retain the RealAudio format versus how many would be willing to switch over to .mp3?

One final question: For transitioning our library of past shows, does anybody have recommendations of programs that would allow us to easily batch-convert our current .ra/.rm and .wav files to .mp3?

(I’m asking these questions here because the radio manager knew I had people on the blog talking about these issues and wanted to get a better sense of what folks wanted, so a little market research was in order.)

Thanks much, folks!