Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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If you want more context to this, there's a lot more in the most recent ATP podcast (with timestamp link included in the article).

Which kind of highlights a problem that I think is only going to grow over time - the general greatness of podcasts has one big black spot in that they're tough to share. I've seen so many discussions recently where there was awesome additional context or info in a recent podcast, but it was tough to share it with people in a format where they'd actually consume it. Whereas, if it had been in a blog, sharing would've been easy. Marco has the right idea with these timestamp links, but even that isn't perfect. A lot of people, especially technical people, won't even click on a non-text source, for better or worse.

It's a shame that a lot of good information is becoming harder to share due to this. It's not even that podcasts are "locked down" or behind a paywall or anything, it's just that people often don't have the time or motivation to listen to them. I don't have a great solution to this; some kind of automatic transcription maybe?

I like podcasts, but they're unnerving to me.

It's too much time wasted to get to the point. And as opposed to music, I can't program properly when listening to them

Not to mention a lot of podcasters act in a radio way (which make sense for radio), with repetitions, talking slowly, endless introductions, chit chat, etc

The "radio stuff" isn't nearly as much of an irritant if you're listening to a podcast while commuting.

It's still kind of grating when you listen to a whole bunch of episodes of something in a row, though. There needs to be markers in the files and software that can cut off the intro/ending of the "internal" episodes in a playlist. Like a much more drastic version of gapless playback.

Chapter markers are a potential solution IF podcast producers use them and mark them accurately and IF your podcast player of choice supports Chapter markers.

Overcast[0], the iOS app that Marco makes supports chapters and he usually adds them when he encodes his podcast and it's pretty nice. Hopefully he releases his personal podcast production tool soon so that it can be more widely used.

[0] https://appsto.re/us/jhe90.i

2x playback speed helps a lot I find.

Some are better than others in those regards. Most of the ones I listen to, I listen to for entertainment - so I don't mind some meandering. And decent podcast apps will give you reasonable skip options - I will frequently skip intros and outros (I'm looking at you, 99% invisible; I have never cared what your boy has to say.)

Yeah, but it's the intro and outro that makes the money.

Not always. I've stopped listening to Marc Maron's podcast because the last one I listened to started off with a 20 minute monologue about his cat. 99% Invisible used to always end the podcast with a quote from his kid about something; maybe it still does, but once the "main show" is over, I just skip to the end and mark it as read.

I do agree there is too much noise, but in the end of the day they are not the pure way to learn, though on the higher end of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_entertainment

> I don't have a great solution to this; some kind of automatic transcription maybe?

This was the original goal of YouTube, as a project: automatic video transcription to enable better accessibility and indexibility for audio/video. It's theoretically in there, but it doesn't do well at all. I'm honestly surprised it doesn't do better, given the Google Voice dataset that's likely backing it.

Actually that was the original goal of Google Video, which never got much traction and was discontinued eventually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Videos

The solution is AAC, regarding which a number of prominent podcasters introduced FUD several years ago and now the podcasting industry is reluctant to give up MP3 -- unlike pretty much every other audio-related industry in the world. Seriously, MP3 was on its way out the year the Backstreet Boys released that song, and it surprises me that people still stick to it despite the VBR thing being a shitty problem in software that long. None of the solutions that Marco found are great, either. The solutions were dismissed decades ago in manners like this:

http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ#why_is_seeking_so_slow_while_p...

Here's an example of podcasters talking each other out of AAC:

http://podcastingguru.com/aac/

His is not the first article I've read conflating "AAC" with some kind of "Enhanced Podcast" buzzword and then dismissing it based on the flaws of "Enhanced Podcasting." I left the radio industry in 2006 and we'd already transitioned all in-house production and delivery away from MP3 then. Probably 50% of the spots we received from external shops in 2006 were MP3.

At some point you have to sit down with your listener and say that MP3 player you bought at Target in 2001 is holding us back, man. Marco is wrong on this one: it's AAC that would deliver all the good things that he wants, not VBR MP3. Fun fact: all AAC is VBR, in a manner of speaking, and it's way better than the hack that is VBR MP3s.

The problem with AAC is in the container format, as Marco explains in his podcast: While some important metadata like chapter marks which a podcast player might want to display are within the first KB in an MP3 file, this same information is interleaved somewhere in the stream in AAC.

Which means that you can't have all features when streaming an AAC file, in a time when streaming podcasts is getting more popular every day. You first have to download the whole file before you can display e.g. chapter information.

Of course you could just embed that information in the RSS feed, but you could do the same with jump tables for VBR MP3s. So AAC does not solve all your problems, you just get a different set of problems.

No, this is incorrect. It's up to the implementation of the muxer to determine where index information goes, which is typically at the end of the file. This is simply because writing a file is a single pass operation, and you don't know the contents of the atom until you've gone through the all the data for each stream. Many muxers provide an option to place it at the beginning of the file by adding padding and overwriting it afterward, which solves the progressive streaming problem.

Weren't they talking about .mov files at the time?

The MP4 container was based on the Quicktime file format (.mov).

Thanks! Makes sense.

Those are all problems with a specific, objectively crappy container, as you've noted. There are many alternative containers and no reason the podcasting community couldn't come up with its own, such as by extending Matroska. This obviously creates separate problems, but I'd like to see the podcasting community start to shape its own destiny a bit rather than expect others to innovate for them or kludge older formats to do things they weren't supposed to do.

Why not a podcasting specific container that handles streaming and fixed cases, includes support for all the novel stuff podcasters want to do, and so on? Container development is one of the easier parts of multimedia, and there's too much thinking around a specific codec being tied to a specific container (just like your comment). Legacy support is of course the big elephant in the room, but I'd venture a well-founded guess that the average podcast listener is listening on a device that supports apps. (Maybe I'm wrong.)

I can't think of a single good container format. They're all rubbish. Even Matroska is arcane and very poorly documented, and suffers from the end goals and types of media it is used for being encoded in the design. Containers are a giant space in which to innovate and have been that way for years. Unfortunately, open source multimedia development is largely tied up by a certain group of people with a certain background and very specific use cases in mind.

That context from the podcast would have been awesome in this piece. Why wasn't it there?

One of the OP's requirements is that this work in iTunes, which precludes making a new container format.

I also think existing containers would meet the requirements - for example, Ogg meets the requirement of both being storable and easily streamable. Also, the Matroska spec is being updated to a new version, and being standardized in the IETF CELLAR working group. I'd highly suggest participating if you'd like to help improve both the format and the specification.

Codec Encoding for LossLess Archiving and Realtime transmission (cellar) documents: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/cellar/documents/

Matroska draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lhomme-cellar-matrosk...

I just don't understand why Marco has bitten so hard into this problem. It doesn't matter at all. Everybody skips the ATP theme song anyway, and VBR will only negligibly improve quality of the rest of the show (as Marco himself has pointed out). And it's not like the theme song sounds bad in its current state! I have never noticed any artifacts or flaws in the recording at all. This is almost literally only something the ATP crew would notice.

Assuming Apple fixes this VBR problem — unlikely — it would still be a far better idea to switch to something like AAC instead of using VBR and massively inconveniencing a) your entire audience on older iOS versions, and b) a large swath of your audience that uses players with equally poor VBR support. This whole brouhaha makes absolutely no sense.

The ATP theme song by Johnathan Mann is unexpectedly awesome, and I never ever skip it. And as Marco pointed out in the ATP episode, this also affects any musical interludes or short musical samples within any podcast.

Yeah, I'm sure lots of people listen to it all the way through. I did for a while myself. But it's not worth inconveniencing so many of your listeners just to make your theme song (or very occasional clips) sound a tiny bit better — especially considering the fact that most people listen to podcasts in their car or even through the iPhone speaker, as Marco himself discovered from his analytics. Others have already noted that the easy solution to this problem exists in the form of AAC, which is supported ubiquitously at this point. Another solution is to just use 128kbps CBR; a 1.3x size increase is really not that big of a big deal, and 128 is transparent for many use cases.

Marco's solution is way, way out of proportion to the actual "problem". You'd think the guy who so often kvetches about Apple prioritizing design over function would know better than to make the same mistake!

Also: I know you don't air your dirty laundry in front of your audience, but I'm a bit disappointed that a careful and analytical engineer like Siracusa didn't call Marco out on this nonsense. (Especially after the .marcosweirdformat discussion, which was downright comical given the inconsequential nature of the problem in the first place.)

What nonsense? He explicitly said in the episode that he studied some options and they were all bad ideas. He made a few million from the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo, has FU money in the bank and he is just scratching an itch and exploring his hobby. I don't see anything wrong with that.

The nonsense is that this is a solution looking for a problem. It's scratching an itch by trying to move a mountain. I am certain that nobody in the history of the podcast has ever complained about the sound quality of the theme song or audio clips, especially after they switched over to 96kbps. Whereas there is no doubt that any technical solution — especially any of the ones proposed, including switching to VBR — would inconvenience a whole lot of people.

(By all means, Marco should continue working in this direction if it interests him. If Apple ends up adding those ID3 tags to their MP3 decoder, it will have a net positive impact on the world. I just think it's a rather foolish endeavor.)

>I am certain that nobody in the history of the podcast has ever complained about the sound quality of the theme song or audio clips, especially after they switched over to 96kbps.

Source?

>Whereas there is no doubt that any technical solution — especially any of the ones proposed, including switching to VBR — would inconvenience a whole lot of people.

It sounded to me like the entire point of his approach is to find a technical solution without inconveniencing people.

"a 1.3x size increase is really not that big of a big deal" - you say this about Marco "All my image resources are vectors so the OverCast App is 5 Megabytes large" Arment? For the same reason that UTF-8 is awesome, VBR podcasts are likewise a perfect system, presuming we can get over the chapter marking hurdles.

Not vector, but drawn by code.

I've always divided 2D graphics of the kind you see in Apps (let's ignore 3D Graphics cards with shaders/textures/etc.. for a bit) into two categories - bitmap and vector graphics. Bitmap is pretty straighforward, and vector graphics (googling for a second) is "...the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons" - which presumably Marco is doing to keep his app size so small?

It sounds like he got into it because it piqued his interest so he did a deep dive on the subject. Nothing wrong with that. I will get frustrated with people sometimes for not doing things that they ought to be doing, but I would never sh*t on someone for following their bliss and spending their hobby time on things I personally am not interested in. If this pisses you off then I can't imagine what sort of vitriol you would direct at someone who is into, say, quilting. "Aren't quilts solved problems already?!? You just go down to Target and buy one, WTF people!"

When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem is to ask people to bug Apple engineers about adding new features to a decade-old encoder, maybe you're on the wrong track.

I'm frustrated by Marco's extreme fussiness, not his curiosity. (And there's no doubt his curiosity often leads to interesting places. I learned some great tidbits about MP3 encoding in the last few episodes!)

> When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem

What solution is that which he didn't mention? He mentioned AAC, custom formats, just do it and ignore the share link issues (LOVE the share links).

I'm referring to the article. I presume that if Apple ends up supporting MLLT ID3 tags natively based on Marco's request, he'll feel free to switch his podcast to VBR without guilt. (Even though this will cause problems for all his non-iOS11 listeners.)

I think you are the one over-reacting really. Marco spent some serious effort investigating something interesting to him and discovered a hole in some important software infrastructure. We can argue about how important the hole is, but there's no doubt it's a hole and filling it in wouldn't inconvenience anybody.

Less seriously, why would you skip over the song? - it's a lovely little song and my only problem with it is that it's an earworm that I find myself internally singing all the time. "John didn't do any research .... da da da". Of course John always does some research anyway. Now if only John would occasionally concede a point or give the other two some credit, maybe just once, life would be perfect.

I mean, we're almost at 200 episodes at this point! Kudos to Jonathan Mann for writing a song that seemingly never gets old, but at this point it just feel like I'm brainwashing myself into remembering a bunch of Twitter handles.

It's not just improving the quality of the theme song, it's decreasing the size of podcasts. A 10-20% reduction in bandwidth costs isn't anything to sneeze at, especially for larger distributors like relay.fm etc.

Theme song by Michael Mann is one of the highlights of the podcast for me (Up there with finding out if Casey Liss's iMac is still crashing) - and, regardless of where I am in the world, I always enjoy singing along to it - though I do moderate if there are people around me; I have never once even been tempted to skip it, and any effort that goes into enhancing it is effort well spent (at least for this audience of one).

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