How to Compress The Audio File of Your Podcast

After you finish recording and editing your podcast, you need to create a data-compressed audio file in order to deliver it over the internet.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• computer
• completed audio file

1. Before you compress the file, consider whether you want to use mono and what you want your bit rate to be. If it's a voice-only podcast, you might want to go with a bit rate of 64 or 32 kbps (lower than your standard 128kbps), so that the file size is smaller. However, if you have music, stick with 128 kbps.
2. Look at your frequency settings. If you can sample frequencies, stick with multiples of 11.025 kHz so the audio files are normalized. You can also with filtering out high and low frequencies.
3. Fill out your ID3 tags for our MP3s. This is the information that your listeners will get about your podcast--artist, title, description--and it will help them organize their podcasts.
4. Podcast audio files are posted as MPEG audio files. You can use Automator or Quicktime Pro to compress it into a smaller AAC file (MPEG 4). Or, you can do it through GarageBand: Export to MPEG Audio, select the checkbox next to "AAC-128-S-44.1" and this will create a high-quality audio file in a small size.

Tips & Warnings

• You can create an enhanced podcast by adding chapters, images, and links for your listener to follow along with as they are listening.
• You can delete the source file when your audio file has been compressed.