I was always fascinated with think'em'ups on my C64, but in those days my English skills were not so hot, so I never really got anywhere trying to play them. This is very cool, so thanks, Casey!
I haven't really spent any time on the encoding. Honestly the MP3 could also be much smaller because right now it is being encoded at 256kbit, I believe, and there is obviously no reason for that given the low quality of the source audio :)
P.S. I just got through the episode, great start to the interviews! The audio quality is not bad enough to be annoying, after a few minutes my brain calibrated and at no point did I feel I was missing vital info. Great work!
Thanks - it was a challenge, but, I am happy it is at least possible to hear and understand these early stories. There were too many good parts in the "almost lost" audio for me not to include them.
Do you perhaps have a link to a very short sample section of the *original* messed up audio data, that I could poke at to see if it's somehow fixable?
I appreciate many pro audio engineers have tried and declared it irreparable, I'm just interested in learning some signal processing, FFT, and file format stuff by working on a real problem.
My assumption is that we are only a year or two away from AI-based audio processing that could fix the issue entirely. But unfortunately we're not quite there yet. I am hoping I will be able to reprocess the audio someday in the future and have a better final version then!
The MP3 file as I got it from this webpage was 96kbps Constant BitRate, not sure if that's what you uploaded, but that's what Substack seems to be serving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Before you mention it to them, keep in mind that (in my humble opinion) 256kbps for voice data is overkill, 96kbps is good, 64kbps is ok.
I guess it would be nice of them to mention in their upload form that "the audio you upload will be re-encoded as a 96kbps CBR MP3 file".
I don't understand why anyone in this decade is not using Opus when building a new website that hosts audio files! Voice podcasts would sound fine even at Opus VBR 32kbps, the Opus codec really is so much better than the nearly 30-year-old MP3 tech.
Brian is such an interesting man! I could hear him all day :) and now I definitely have to play Trinity xD
I'm glad you liked it! There's so much more good stuff to come, too.
- Casey
I'll be listening to all of it for sure
Thank you for making these available. As you said, Brian is a great storyteller.
I was always fascinated with think'em'ups on my C64, but in those days my English skills were not so hot, so I never really got anywhere trying to play them. This is very cool, so thanks, Casey!
The audio is certainly good enough for me but I can see what you mean. What is the story behind what went wrong with the recording?
Hi Casey!
Have you thought about encoding your podcast audio as Opus files?
You can get pretty much the same quality audio into a much smaller file i.e. this 40MB MP3 episode would go down to a 14MB Opus file.
Try to use your original lossless audio (WAV or FLAC?) for the best quality, avoid transcoding it from the MP3 file.
Let me know if you have any Opus codec questions, I've been a mostly happy user for several years :-)
I haven't really spent any time on the encoding. Honestly the MP3 could also be much smaller because right now it is being encoded at 256kbit, I believe, and there is obviously no reason for that given the low quality of the source audio :)
- Casey
P.S. I just got through the episode, great start to the interviews! The audio quality is not bad enough to be annoying, after a few minutes my brain calibrated and at no point did I feel I was missing vital info. Great work!
Thanks - it was a challenge, but, I am happy it is at least possible to hear and understand these early stories. There were too many good parts in the "almost lost" audio for me not to include them.
- Casey
Do you perhaps have a link to a very short sample section of the *original* messed up audio data, that I could poke at to see if it's somehow fixable?
I appreciate many pro audio engineers have tried and declared it irreparable, I'm just interested in learning some signal processing, FFT, and file format stuff by working on a real problem.
Yes, actually you can go to https://github.com/cmuratori/moriarty_audio for a WAV sample.
My assumption is that we are only a year or two away from AI-based audio processing that could fix the issue entirely. But unfortunately we're not quite there yet. I am hoping I will be able to reprocess the audio someday in the future and have a better final version then!
- Casey
The MP3 file as I got it from this webpage was 96kbps Constant BitRate, not sure if that's what you uploaded, but that's what Substack seems to be serving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That is very much not what I uploaded :(
BAD SUBSTACK. I will complain.
- Casey
It’s also ironic given what they do to the video file sizes for the rest of the coarse.
Before you mention it to them, keep in mind that (in my humble opinion) 256kbps for voice data is overkill, 96kbps is good, 64kbps is ok.
I guess it would be nice of them to mention in their upload form that "the audio you upload will be re-encoded as a 96kbps CBR MP3 file".
I don't understand why anyone in this decade is not using Opus when building a new website that hosts audio files! Voice podcasts would sound fine even at Opus VBR 32kbps, the Opus codec really is so much better than the nearly 30-year-old MP3 tech.
Anyway, good luck with Substack support ^_^
That's great to hear - it took a lot of work to get it to this point, so I am glad to hear it is OK!
- Casey
Agree, audio is fine.