Auphonic Blog

I think another big factor in podcasts getting more popular these days is that the content and quality of podcasts are getting better. Today you don't need equipment and staff only radio stations can afford to produce high quality good sounding content. A computer with an USB mic and Audacity together with a tool like Auphonic [1] are enough to get good sound. The internet makes it easier to research stuff and prepare content collaboratively without being in the same room.

Because we strongly believe that there is a bright future for podcasting a friend and I started Podigee [2]. Our aim is to make publishing a podcast easier and faster so beginners can get an easy start and more experienced podcasters can focus on producing high quality content without worrying about publishing software and infrastructure.

Additionally we support a movement that was started here in Germany called Podlove [3]. They provide open source software like a Wordpress plugin for publishing podcasts and a web player which is currently completely revised (and will be pretty awesome after that). Besides that they also try to establish new standards and promote old ones that are not widely used (like paged feeds). Currently we (I do most of the coding) are working on a new kind of subscribe button [4] which will make subscribing a podcast a lot easier for listeners. We have a lot of podcast client developers on board to support subscribing through the button and we have high hopes that this will push…

I'm currently working on a 2HD 3.5 inch floppy disk release of a podcast episode which has taken me down an interesting rabbit hole of low-bitrate audio codecs, floppy disk aesthetics and label design.

The episode I'm releasing is 1h40m long, which sounds like it couldn't possibly fit in 1.44MB, but there's an obscure but free codec mostly used by digital HAM radio enthusiasts called Codec2 [1] which can encode human voice in as low as 700bit/s (315KB/hr). At that quality setting it sounds like complete garbage, although still barely intelligible, and there are no readily available media players for it (there's not even an established file format) so I'm having to include complicated ffmpeg instructions in a README to get people to play it, but I think it all adds to the charm.

Funnily enough after searching for days for how to fit the original episode in a floppy (tried low-bitrate MP3, Opus and AAC, all of which fail at the task), and after discovering Codec2 almost by chance, I only then came across an article titled "Codec2: a whole Podcast on a Floppy Disk" [2] which I probably would've found if I had started by searching "podcast in a floppy".

1: https://github.com/drowe67/codec2

2: https://auphonic.com/blog/2018/06/01/codec2-podcast-on-floppy-disk/

That's kind of like I do it [1], I only have a RSS file and the mp3 uploaded to the server. I send that RSS link to that one iTunes service so it indexes the RSS file so that all the podcast apps which use their API for their search can find my podcast and subscribe to the RSS file on my server and download the mp3's from my server.

For the gear, I went fairly cheap, I got a Zoom H5 [2], which is super small, light and portable and two lavalier mics, one for me and one for the person I interview.

I then upload the two WAV files to Auphonic [3] and they add the jingles to it, clean up the sound, normalize it and let me download the mono mp3 which is really small but good quality, which I then upload to my server.

The whole workflow is surprisingly easy and fast. The most time I spend on finding people to talk to and trying to arrange a meeting at a specific time and place.

[1] https://jeena.net/pods.rss
[2] https://zoom-na.com/products/field-video-recording/field-recording/h5-handy-recorder
[3] https://auphonic.com/

This. These are largely mixing decisions, although it would be kinda weird to have a whispering actor boosted to sound as loud as a train in a scene.

The technical term for this is “Dialogue LRA” measured in LU: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/insight200/en/loudness/index.html - this link also mentions some of the standards around this and now to use their software to adhere to those standards.

LUFS is also relevant here as a measure of loudness: https://blog.landr.com/lufs-loudness-metering/

https://auphonic.com/blog/2020/10/08/dialog-loudness-normalization/

and

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/11/10/is-dolby-dialog-intelligence-still-fit-for-purpose-for-netflix-to-use-for-speech-gating

Give some insight into how this works.

Wow! Thank you so much! You are right, I need to get ASAP a copywriter.

I'm curious why the Subscription + Onetime Credit is bad. But I agree it is confusing.

My understanding is that not every customer wants or needs a subscription, since they upload podcasts irregularly.

This business model is seen in other AI products:

https://www.remove.bg/pricing
https://auphonic.com/pricing

I am very grateful, you took the time to help out. Really appreciate it!