Hiya, welcome back to the DailySplice blog. I’m Lewis, the token tech geek and co-founder of the podcasting website DailySplice. Today, I’ll be filling your eyeballs with a discussion of audio formats, particularly the differences between the tried-and-true MP3, and the newfangled MP4.

Most audio podcasts are distributed as either an MP3 or M4A file. Both are implementations of perceptual audio coding, a data compression scheme that uses a “psychoacoustic model” to identify and remove irrelevant data. A newbie to audio compression may ask “what part of a song or someone’s voice can be just thrown away without anybody noticing?” Turns out lots.

Regardless of how deep your understanding is of the inner workings of perceptual audio coding, you’ve gotta find the concept extremely cool. Not only does it involve complex math and dorky computer lingo, but also the psychology of the human ear. Researchers analyzed the different sensitivities of your ear for many pitches, volumes, and pannings that can hit your ears, called a psychoacoustic model. An algorithm uses that model to determine what information should be kept and what should be thrown away. For example, if your ear hears a loud sound at one frequency, for a short period it becomes less sensitive to frequencies around it. Since most humans can’t hear the surrounding frequencies at that moment, there’s no need to save that information and it’s tossed out. There are many, many situations where audio data can be thrown out with the listener being none the wiser.

MP3 audio was and still is the most popular form of perceptual audio coding, and it’s been around longer than most people have been able to afford computers fast enough to play it. Since then, the term has become ubiquitous; my grandma even knows what an MP3 is. Despite alternatives, MP3 audio is the most popular format for publishing audio podcasts.

MP4 is the new kid in town, and if Apple has its way it will do to MP3 audio what DVDs did to videocassettes. Technically, MP4 is a misnomer; a more accurate name is Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), a sequence of data that describes encoded audio. It’s that sequence of encoded audio that’s packaged inside an MP4 or M4A file (the files are the same; just a different extension). MP4 offers better compression than MP3, particularly at low bitrates. This alone is not much incentive for podcasters to switch, but other features provided by MP4 are worth some attention.

One feature that is suitable for us podcasters is the chapter mark. M4A files can contain timestamps within the file that can be navigated in a “chapter skip” manner, similar to DVD movies. There are other useful and flashy features like embedded logos, audiobooks, slideshows, and closed captions. An audiobook is a file that remembers where the listener was in the file, so it can resume from where it left off. An enhanced podcast includes a number of pictures alongside the audio. They can be changed at certain points, much like an slideshow or timed powerpoint presentation.

Despite the advantages of MP4, its older brother MP3 is still king; only about 1% of the podcast episodes indexed at DailySplice are in MP4 or M4A format. I think a lot of this has to do with a lack of good tools to create MP4 files and take advantage of its features. For years, MP3 has enjoyed a colossal amount of corporate and hobbyist support. There are dozens of encoding libraries and software for creating and playing MP3 audio. There are many more MP3-enabled devices available than there are MP4-enabled, and free tools for creating MP3s are widely available on almost any platform.

Not so much for MP4 yet. There is only one free open-source AAC encoder available, and development on it seems to have stopped. Another time, I was looking far and wide for a Linux tool to add chapter marks to my podcast. I came up miserably empty. Furthermore, all of those extra features need to be supported by the player. So far, support for MP4 is patchy; the iPod is the only device I’m aware of that supports the chapter mark feature.

DailySplice supports podcasts in either format, but for now the splice itself is only available as an MP3. I’m curious about how many of you would like it available in MP4 or some other format.

Hey, thanks for stopping by the DailySplice blog! This is the blog to go along with our podcasting website DailySplice. I’m Rian, and I just want to kick things off by talking a bit about what kinds of mischief we’re up to with DailySplice.

In short, we want to change the way you think about audio podcasts. Let me explain…

You probably don’t think of podcasts as something that is meant to be a part of your daily routine. Research companies usually regard you as a “regular podcast listener” if you listen once per week. If you listen to podcasts, you probably think one of the reasons they’re cool is because they’re “on demand.” The idea of using podcasts in your routine may even seem counter intuitive. But podcasts will never be mainstream until we can change the meaning of a “regular podcast listener” into someone who listens as a part of their daily routine.

The podcasting industry made 165 million in 2007, while the radio industry raked in 20.1 billion. 77% of Americans over 12 are exposed to radio on a daily basis. Almost everyone has some kind of daily routine, and it’s so easy to tune into radio that a lot of people end up including radio in that routine.

Podcasts need to replace radio. They’re time-shiftable, there’s more content to choose from, they’re more targeted, easier to track for advertisers, and these days you’ve probably got your own device capable of playing them within reach 24 hours a day.

So why don’t you listen to podcasts everyday? Instead of setting your morning alarm to the radio, you should just find some good podcasts, subscribe to them, get up a bit earlier every morning and download your new podcasts, sync them up with iPod, choose which ones you want to listen to that day, and every once in a while find a few more good ones and delete the boring ones.

Sounds Fantastic eh? But surprisingly, the majority of people would rather just listen the quirky morning DJs prank call Buck’s Auto Garage every morning then put in the extra effort.

Podcast’s lack the accessibility, organization, and predictability that radio has. Without these, podcasts will never become a suitable part of your routine, regardless of how great the content is. But what if we could make it as easy to find, subscribe, and sync up good podcasts as it is to tune into a radio show? What if we could organize the entire global podcast community into one central network that produced as much or more quality content then all the radio stations combined? What if, just as you can always be assured the radio DJs will be at work every morning, you could be assured that the perfect amount of high quality and relevant podcast content would be delivered to your mp3 player every day?

Over the next little while, DailySplice will be introducing a number of podcast tools that will eventually make all these things and more a reality. Our mission is to make it easier to use podcasts in your routine than it is to listen to the radio. A lofty goal, but if you’ve got a beta account you may already be seeing how this can be possible with the tools we’re building.

If you don’t have a beta account, we’ve still got a free a podcasts directory for you to use. It’s a work in progress, but we’re releasing it now because we want you to help us. We want you to submit podcasts, rate them, tag them, discuss them, and tell us what else we need to do to make it easier for others to find them.

You’ll notice something in our directory that you won’t find anywhere else: publishing schedule information. You can see what days of the week a podcast is typically published, what time it usually comes out, and how long it is. This is going to be important for our vision because we want a podcast’s publication schedule to influence how you choose podcasts. We hope we can start building some standards in the industry so that podcasters make podcasts that are more suitable for your routine.

Of course we’ve also got some features on the site to help you start connecting with friends. Your friends can help you find podcasts and help us recommend your own top podcasts. Once you’ve set up a username and password, go to the Share section to start building a profile and networking.

So welcome to DailySplice, we look forward to putting podcasts into your daily routine!