What Bitrate Should Your MP3 Be

I’m no audio guru so certainly podcast and audio gurus ou there will be saying “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about” – maybe I don’t but I’m a marketer and to a marketer, it doesn’t matter whether I use perfect technology if it’s not going to work for my customers and potential customers, it’s worth nothing.

I have three MP3 players some branded some are no brand el cheapos. I could never figure out why the low cost player would skip like crazy but when I play back the same file on my PC it sounded great. After much tinkering and discussion with my brother, we figured it out – the bitrate was too low – it was 56k bit/s so I did some poking around all the teleseminar recordings and podcasts I subscribe to. It seems this is a popular bitrate – maybe to make the file as small as possible.

When I converted the file from 56k bit/s to 64 k bit/s, it played beautifully on my low cost player. My conclusion? When podcasting remember you will be catering to listeners who carry the range from ipods to the cheapest ones out there. This is by all means not bible truth but in my tests, 64 kbit/s with a sample rate of 16000 seems to be a good balance between file size and ‘playerbility’.

Have you had any similar problems?

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4 Comments

  1. Guy Cook on July 15, 2005 at 7:49 pm

    Thanks, that’s something I’ve wondered about, not being an audio guru, but sort of knew there must be a ‘right way’ Keep up the good content, short and to the point is what I like most about your articles, not a lot of ‘fluff’ and ‘nonsense’ saves time.



  2. Guy Cook on July 15, 2005 at 2:49 pm

    Thanks, that’s something I’ve wondered about, not being an audio guru, but sort of knew there must be a ‘right way’ Keep up the good content, short and to the point is what I like most about your articles, not a lot of ‘fluff’ and ‘nonsense’ saves time.



  3. Lynette on July 15, 2005 at 9:38 pm

    Hey Guy, thank you! I’d never would have figured that out or knew there is a problem if I didn’t own a unbranded cheap player. Guess it helps sometimes 🙂



  4. Lynette on July 15, 2005 at 4:38 pm

    Hey Guy, thank you! I’d never would have figured that out or knew there is a problem if I didn’t own a unbranded cheap player. Guess it helps sometimes 🙂