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The Talk Show Needs Chapters

I told John Gruber last week that The Talk Show podcast should have chapters. I was told Dan Benjamin wanted to stick with MP3 over AAC.

Thoughts?

11 Responses to "The Talk Show Needs Chapters"

  1. Desperately.

    Actually, I can't tell if the show is edited at all. That's not critisism. I like it for what it is.

  2. Can both be done, if enough people want chapters?

    MP3 is generally more compatible, but given that most of your audience will be Mac users...you probably don't have to stress over that.

  3. I think the vast majority of people who listen to podcasts are able to play AAC files. I don't really see a reason to stick with MP3's. The benefits outweigh the negatives.

  4. The show is edited a great deal. We usually record about an hour, and I cut 25-30 minutes.

    I'm thinking about adding chapters, but for now I'm sticking with mp3 to allow for the widest possible audience (and because we want to avoid having two versions of each show).

  5. Technically, the latest ID3 tag format supports chapter markers, but I've never seen it implemented.

  6. In an ideal world Apple would have adopted the id3v2.4 frames and chapters spec in iTunes, but in the real world offering a separate AAC podcast feed would be the easiest way...

  7. AAC with chapters is nice (and I may choose AAC for The Talk Show since I only listen on my iPhone), but there is something to be said for the universal nature of MP3 and skipping the confusion of two separate podcast feeds. MP3s are like plain text files -- everything will be able to play them even two decades from now.

    Also you need to go MP3 if you want compatibility with Flash-based players.

  8. In that case, Dan, what was less interesting than blue aliens?

    😉

  9. I like having podcasts in MP3 format because I usually listen to them on my car's CD player. (I burn them to CD-RW.) The CD player doesn't support AAC, so there are some podcasts which I never listen to because they're not available as MP3.

  10. I find chapters to be god awfully annoying, because if I want to skip a podcast, they make doing so far more tedious than such a task should be.

  11. Yes, I don't really see a reason to stick with MP3's. The benefits outweigh the negatives.