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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

That's not the only reason. We have been podcasting for over 10 years, and early on we tried to use VBR MP3s because we are teach people who know about that sort of thing.

As it turns out, not everyone is listening using a modern device. When we tried VBR a significant number of people could not listen because their MP3 playing hardware/software of choice did not support VBR files properly. They didn't realize this was the problem. They just complained that the file was corrupted while it was working fine for everyone else.

Also, lots of encoders, including Adobe Audition/Adobe Media Encoder, don't write the headers on VBR files properly. This also causes a lot of players to fail at playing them properly.

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1072786

When you make a podcast, maximum compatibility is the priority over audio quality and file size. So standard old MP3 it is.

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My favorite bug about this was on an _ancient_ MP3 player I had (an EigerMan F20), which supported VBR MP3s...incompletely. It didn't support decoding regions with certain bitrates, so it would just silently skip them, leading to extreme confusion on my part.

I had a similar problem and never considered that...

> When you make a podcast, maximum compatibility is the priority over audio quality and file size. So standard old MP3 it is.

Interesting how the incentives can be different. Stuck without proper broadband and paying for all the precious MBs for a few weeks I made a proxy for downloading/recoding podcasts as VBR on external server to save my data...

> using a modern device

How are we defining modern here?

I'm pretty certain my Nomad Jukebox 3 supported VBRs fine, and that's coming up on 14 years old now.

Marco and the others mentioned this on the example podcast episode (linked from he article).

Hardware support for VBR is pretty decent now.

I had an old MP3 player that would play VBR files with variable speed. I suppose the speed changed depending on the bitrate of the part of the file, but I wouldn't know how to check it in such details.

VBR have been the red-headed step-child of MP3 since the beginning. I have no idea why, maybe it was difficult to write good encoders and decoders for it for back in the day. The few times I used them, I found trivial space savings compared to a CBR and to be honest I thought I could hear a difference (maybe its not humanly possible if the implementation of the encoder/decoder is good but what if the implementation is sub-par?). Storage and bandwidth are so cheap, why bother today?

iPhone storage and cellular bandwidth are still extremely expensive. Over $100 for a measly 16gb of storage or 4gb of LTE.

$100 gets you 48GB of storage these days, and at my overage rates it would buy about 7GB of transmission. Not that this really changes your point.

Is 16GB really that measly when it comes to podcasts? Even at, say, 128MB per hour (!) you've got over 100 hours of capacity there. Enough for a full waking week, nonstop.

People with 16 GB iPhones really struggle with running out of storage. Some may be lucky to fit one 128 MB podcast on their phone.

Android takes up 6.5GB, the dozen-ish apps I use seem to take 3.5GB. So, that leaves 6GB of general storage. The browser cache and all music, photos and podcasts need to fit into those 6GB.

A single episode of a podcast may be an hour and a half. If you are subscribed to 5 weekly podcasts, then that's about 1GB of data you'll need. If you're going on a long trip, maybe you stock up. That might take 3GB or 4GB... But that probably won't fit on your phone. It certainly doesn't fit on mine.

It's completely absurd when a 64GB microSD card is less than $20.

https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-microSDXC-Standard-Packaging-...

>iPhone storage and cellular bandwidth are still extremely expensive. Over $100 for a measly 16gb of storage or 4gb of LTE.

...is "don't use an iPhone until they start adding microSDs to their phones and don't stream" too obvious or am I missing something here?

I've had problems with hardware players that couldn't handle 320kbps blocks of VBR. Restricting the max bitrate fixed the issue but most encoders don't expose this as an option (lame does).

And audio data is relatively small that the savings aren't that valuable.

That's not true. In the ATP episode Marvo mentioned he wanted the theme song or clips to be able to sound really good (192 or 256kbps stereo) but their normal talking was nearly perfect at 96 mono.

Then add in all the gaps in people's speech where you need almost no data and he said he got pretty good savings.

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