I tweeted the other day about having a problem with Audacity's LAME MP3 Encoder when used for Godbyte's devotional podcast, and said I'd blog about it so here we are.

I have been having a tough time deciding on the level of compression that I want to have for the Godbyte Devocast. Of late I have been recording each devo in Audacity on my Desktop PC with a cheap headset that I purchased off of Amazon. The reason I'm not using Garageband on my Macbook is because I have been having trouble with the sound quality using this particular headset. It's a USB Stereo headset with microphone, and for some reason Garageband picks up this high pitched noise that I haven't been able to remove; but strangely this is not an issue on my Desktop PC.

So...I've been using Audacity to record the devos, but during the encoding process have been discouraged by really strange artifacts (really weird garbly noises) in the final file. I've been exporting the project as a 64-bit CBR mono (joint stereo) mp3 file (which, from what I've read and come to understand, is the standard for podcasts). Someone suggested that I try running my audio through Garageband's encoder to see if it did a better job, and it did!

So until I figure out how to get the LAME MP3 encoder to work with those settings, my "temporary" work around workflow involves: Recording the initial podcast in Audacity on my PC, exporting to a very high quality file (320-bit), moving the file to my Macbook, opening it in garageband, exporting in garageband, then back to my PC for editing the tags and uploading to the site (what a waste of time). If this problem is ever resolved, or I find a better way then I'll post a comment to this post.

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