Attack of the Pod Penguins 7: Encoding with lame

Tune your spoken-word podcast for quick download, or your music podcast for a high-quality listening experience. We survey your MP3 options.

By Tony Steidler-Dennison, LinuxWorld.com, 03/01/07

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In the opening piece of the "Attack of the Pod Penguins" series, I mentioned my friend Justin, the carpenter. In his line of work as a builder, he carries a tool belt containing everything he'll need to complete a job - hammer, nails, speed square, tape measure, pencil and a load of other assorted hand tools. The podcasting tool belt isn't so different from that worn and shiny fold of leather slapping against Justin's hip. The point is to provide every tool you'll need to complete the podcasting job.

Throughout this series, we've started to fill that belt, both with actual tools and with knowledge that will allow you to use those tools in a powerful and effective way. We spent a few installments looking at the inner workings of Audacity, the 16-oz framing hammer of open source podcasting. It allows you to capture and edit the source audio files for your podcast - like driving nails into the initial structure of a 2x6 pine board. We've examined the inner workings of normalize, a planer, if you will, for fitting all the discrete pieces of that podcast perfectly together edge to edge. We've also been to podcasting carpentry school, filling in the important details of how air pressure works on the human ear. We've discussed the carpenter's level of the psychoacoustic model, the theoretical tool that allows you to reduce file sizes while maintaining maximum perceptual sound quality. In short, you now have some tools and background knowledge that will allow you to produce a podcast with open source tools that, from a sound quality perspective, nearly all listeners will find enjoyable. In other words, you have many of the tools you'll need to make the focus of your podcast the content, rather than the sound quality.

In this installment of "Attack of the Pod Penguins," we're working toward hanging the sheet rock on the walls of the podcast we've built in the previous installments. Framing in a house is nice, if not exactly beautiful. It needs some additional work to allow you hang pictures in the living room. You need a medium for those nails or picture hangers, and a foundation into which to sink them. Painting the walls is also essential, but you'll need the sheet rock in a finished form prior to applying the colors. That's where we're heading in this installment of this series.

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