Bit By Bit

Here’s one of the comments that has been waiting for moderation:

Name: Richard Gatarski
Mr. Sprankle,
Yet another excellent show! And I truly appreciate the new format you created. That is, having your students (Donna and Ryan repeat the points learned and share them with us as a podcast. A very neat concept. It probably helped D&R even more to understand the things you discussed.

Now I want to return your generousity with a tip. I have played with the new iLife ‘06 and many things have improved, including to ease up the podcast production/process in a Mac environment. Unfortunately Apple still does not want to support mp3 in that context. Too bad, as many listeners can´t play the .aif file format. As you demonstrated in the show, converting aif to mp3 in iTunes is a rather cumbersome process.

Fortunately Kal Ström, a Swedish friend of mine and one of the first podcasters here (www.dagensskiva.com), told me about a much better method.

There is a free OSX application called Lamebrain, which can be downloaded from http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11031. Install it first, and drag the application to tha dashboard if you so wish. Lamebrain can be used with many different settings, called “profiles”. Kal has experimented with settings for his podcast. I took his and changed VBR (variable bit rate) into CBR (Constant Bit Rate) plus that I reduced to 96 kbs). (I think I heard somewhere that some players have a problem with VBR). My profile, together with instructions, can be downloaded from http://skolsmart.skolmarknad.info/shared/ and then moved into your Applications/Lamebrain/profiles folder on the Mac.
I hope this makes it even more easy for all of you that want to make podcasts.
Cheers,
/richard

Awesome! Thank you, Richard. I can’t wait to try this. Hopefully this will better quality/speed!