The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Back to the Beginning

The distribution of digitized audio recordings has been around—in one form or another—for nearly as long as the Internet has existed. The first audio files to commonly appear on the early Internet were based on the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). These files included Audio Interchange File Format (.aiff) on Macintosh computers and later Waveform Audio (.wav) files on Windows PCs. A typical 3½-minute song at CD quality occupied an uncompressed file size of about 35 megabytes (MB). Because of its smaller file size and faster download times, a highly compressed audio format called MP3 emerged and soon became the de facto standard for Internet audio. MP3 stands for the Motion Picture Experts Group standard MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, and is able to fit that same 3½-minute song into roughly 3.5MB—a 10-fold reduction in size—with practically no discernible loss of quality. Podcasting, for the most part, is done in the MP3 format.

Note: Keep file size and download times in mind when creating your podcasts—a 20-minute session in CD-quality stereo could run more than 30MB. Fortunately, bit rate is a selectable parameter in most podcast recording software, and choosing a lower bit rate and monaural encoding can cut the size of a spoken language podcast by another factor of four while still sounding great.

The Birth of iPod

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod to the world on October 23, 2001. The iPod was not the first portable digital music player—SaeHan ...