Found this and thought it was interesting. Claiming to be almost every file format in existence in one list. Including now unused formats and current. I would have no idea if the list is complete but I reckon that it might go close.
So if you have ever wondered if a file format exists or ever has; this is a great place to start. Alphabetical order for easy searching.
Almost Every file format in the world!
I have been putting this off for quite some time. My humble PC is in dire need of a rebuild. I have put it off and put it off until I can no longer ignore it. The frequent error messages and faults and bugs have risen to the point where I can no longer truly trust it.
The latest and greatest problem is that the damn thing will not shut down on the first request. All it does is shut down the running applications but it remains on at the desktop. Other than that I am getting exception errors and program faults, especially when they are shut down. Not sure why that is but then it is Windows and I don’t think that we are supposed to understand it.
This week is the perfect opportunity due tot he fact that we have not got a show this week. We also thought that with Easter, we deserved a week off and time to catch up with our families and friends… me, I’ll be working! But once the show returns the week after this one, we have a couple of exciting developments to tell everyone about as 2007 rolls on by.
Tonight I am on the prowl for those elusive files that you seem to always miss or forget that you needed and loose in the format… I hate that. But I have had some great tips and applications that are going to help me out. Such as MozBackup. This little utility will back up your profile in both Firefox and Thunderbird (plus the many other suites that are available). Plus everything with it including bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache and so on.
To tell the truth I am dreading it. Wish me luck and I will see you on the other side!
Oh… and if I am “missing” you will know why!
I am not sure if anyone else has to manage audio files that have been .mp3 encoded prior to editing but for the podcast it has been causing some issues. This week however, I made a few changes to the encoding and it appears to have made a significant difference. Here is what I have done and if anyone has any further suggestions I would appreciate it.
The background of this whole saga is that I used to record the podcast using Hot Recorder. Since the release of Skype 3.0+ this has failed to record anything but silence. Although he website claims it does work with 3.0. So we had to look to an alternative. Knightwise has a Mac so that made it a lot easier for us to decide what to do but our decision then presented a few things we had to work around.
For some reason recording Skype on a Mac is relatively easy compared to a Windows based machine. Not sure why. It might be the way that Mac handles audio or that there has been more development on the Mac in this regard. So we decided to record the show on Knightwise’s Mac. He uses Call Recorder to record Skype, which by the way has excellent results. Far superior to what I was getting with Hot Recorder. But now we had a great recording of the show in .wav which is generally about 1GB in size… +2.4GB but it was on the other side of the world! We needed to get it to Oz in one piece and in good enough quality to work with.
A great supporter of the podcast donated a server which has excellent speed and storage in addition to as many FTP accounts as we needed. However sending a 1GB file across the world is out of the question, even zipped up it would be huge! The only answer that we could see was to encode the .wav as an .mp3 in as high a quality as possible. So Knightwise encodes the file raw as a 192 kbps, CD quality. The result is about 100MB, which is very manageable. He then sends the file to me via FTP.
I download the file and convert it to a .wav and edit the show as per usual. When finished the file would be encoded as an .mp3 at 64 kbps at 44100 khz. We dropped the bps a while back to give us a smaller file size, which we thought would be appreciated. However since we swapped to Knightwise recording the show the 64 bit quality has been giving us poor results. I have tried to optimize for quality in the encode but it has made no difference.
The problem is that .wav files loose certain frequencies when they are encoded to .mp3. You can’t get them back they are gone forever. Sure I do everything that I can to get the best results. But the 64 bit rate was stripping more of those frequencies out of the final file than I would like. This resulted in some rather strange sounding ambient sounds and hissing when there was talking in addition to making the music tracks terrible. There was only one thing for it.
This week I increased the bit rate. Although in the beginning the show was encoded at 96 kpbs; I thought I would take the intermediate step of 80 kpbs. The result was a file that was only about 4-5 MB larger but the pay off in quality I think was worth it.
The conclusion is that when we changed the way the show is recorded and then encoded before transfer, we should have decided to increase the bit rate. The 16 bit increase in quality has compensated for the lost frequencies the first time it was encoded as an .mp3 making the file resilient to being decoded to .wav and then back to a .mp3. A few further tweaks at the recording end will give us some further head room as far as quality.
I would remind all podcasters out there of one of the golden rules of editing, never edit a .mp3, always convert it to a .wav. I hope this hack helps anyone else faced with the same problem of transcontinental podcasting and file transfer. Check out this weeks show and compare the difference.
UPDATE: Hot Recorder has been updated to version 2.14, which I am told does work with Skype 3.0+. I am yet to test it but I will let you know the results. Thanks to mswiczar for the tip in the comments.
I learned today that WordPress.com has added the feature of both uploading audio files and a player. This potentially means that WordPress could be used as a podcasting platform. The only stumbling block at this point is the RSS feed.
You can now upload a file of up to 25MB onto WordPress. Not bad, but for our show it is short of the file size that we need. But for a lot of podcasts it might be enough, or you could decrease your bit rate to get the file size down. The other thing that has been added is the Audio Player WordPress Plugin. It is a common player that you would have seen before that works very well.
Consider also that unless you purchase more space then you only have 50MB allocated to you as a WordPress.com Blog owner. It won’t take long to use that up as a podcaster (our shows average 32MB each). So there is added cost there as well. But don’t make the assumption that you are restricted to the 25MB limit on file size, or that you have to buy more space here on WordPress.
There is nothing stopping you having the files hosted elsewhere and playing them from your blog here. You might have a server to host files. To demonstrate this I have embedded last weeks Global Geek Podcast that is hosted on The Podcast Network. You could have a file anywhere on the Internet. But just make sure that you host the content and are not leeching it from some poor blokes server! Some consider this theft, as well as bad form. The same as you should not embed photos on your blog unless you host them. But remember files don’t have to be hosted here to be played in the on-line player.
Okay so what is stopping WordPress.com from being able to be the “home” of your podcast? Probably the most important thing of all. You can either host the audio file here or somewhere else right. So that is the restriction on file size out of the way but once you place that file in a player on your blog you need it recognized as an enclosure. If it is not then a podcast it isn’t. The enclosure is what is needed for things like iTunes and feedreaders, “pod-catchers” in general to be able to download your podcast for the user. If it is not an enclosure then it won’t be “seen” by the RSS reader or aggrigator. By definition the audio file not being an enclosure is not a podcast, but an embedded audio file in a web page. Or “streaming audio” in other words.
I have had one file that I linked to here on the blog; recognized as an enclosure. Once, then it has never happened again and I don’t know why not. I sent a support request to WordPress.com and got nothing back. I did nothing different to what I would normally do. Go figure.
Not only that there is no micro-management of RSS on WordPress.com. You can’t tell it what to do, we are at the mercy of the guys at WordPress. They do a good job though, I have never had a problem. But you need this to be able to manage the podcast. The feed is crucial to the success of any podcast.
So while we are able to have fun with a player and be able to upload files now, which is great; we can not look at WordPress.com as a viable cost effective means to host a podcast. It may be something they are aiming for, right now though we have a cool player and that is all. As cool as that might be the file needs to be recognised as an enclosure, once that happens we are nearly there. Next is the RSS… then we might be podcasting here on WordPress.com.
As promised here is The Global Geek Podcast #034 :: Looks are Everything. Check out the Show Notes, links to everything we talk about can be found there. Plus I blog there as well as here through the week.
Nice player eh? Apparently a movie player is coming. Now, I have to figure out how to use the operators to get the colours to match the blog theme…
Now this is exciting. I have just discovered that AllPeers has gone live and is available for download from the official Mozilla extensions site. You can check out the features of AllPeers by having a look at the All Peers homepage.
AllPeers is a sharing extension for everything! You can share files from your local machine, web-pages and if you don’t want to share the whole page just share a picture; no problem – just drag and drop the picture you want to share to the contact that you want to share it with. Drag and drop goodness.From the screen shots it looks like you have contacts that are easily added with an invite via email. It is cross platform with XP, Mac and LINUX support.
I am keen to try it out. No more huge emails! Maybe email will be used as it is supposed to be used now… for text? They are also touting that it is secure, my only concern is that it is. I have just checked the All Peers FAQ and all transfers are made using SSL. Any app that has access to your files in this manner needs to be.
It would appear that it installs yet another toolbar on Firefox. I am not sure if it is toolbar worthy though, I will have to see. I am very guarded about what toolbars I let Firefox have, one toolbar means a sacrifice of screen real-estate – so the application has to be great for me to be totally in favour. But like most Firefox applications and extensions there the toolbar is usually fully customisable and you decide where it goes if at all. I trust that this is the case with AllPeers.
This really does look like a killer application. The question now is how fast is it? I am assuming that it is going to be quicker than sharing files using IM clients. From reports it would seem that the transfer rate is reasonable, they have been described as “very good”.
Please remember that this is Beta and the usual rules apply for “beta” stuff. I would stay tuned for this one to be updated rapidly and development to be fast and furious as this exert implies from the AllPeers Official Blog, PeerPressure:
“…this is still a beta and we’re keen to hear about any suggestions you have for improving AllPeers. We’ve built a fabulous foundation (if I may say so myself) so you can expect to see rapid progress from here on out. I’ve seen a lot of questions of various stripes here and around the blogosphere. I’ll get a FAQ out as soon as possible that addresses them all and gives some more insight into our long-term plans.”
No doubt we will review this extension on the next The Global Geek Podcast, it looks like a great application that will solve many, many problems. Myself and my friends are always trying to share large files and constantly sharing web images and URL’s, this is a God-send in my opinion. Can’t wait to see what is next.
I am off to lunch. Don’t know why I am telling you that but I am…
AGP Feed
Rooster's Rail 