Re: Megaphone file sizes make me look into state of VBR
Reply #10 – 2023-12-11 11:32:43
the seeking problem, within mp3 MP3 wasn't designed to be seekable in the first place. If you wanted that, you were supposed to put it in a container, and the MPEG-1 standard defined MPEG-PS for that purpose. Newer audio codecs require a container to function at all - for example, you can't decode a raw AAC bitstream the way you can with MP3 - and the container ensures accurate seeking for those codecs. There's one popular hack for VBR metadata in raw MP3, the Xing header, but it only has 100 seek points specified in units of 1/256 the file size. That's not nearly precise enough for accurate seeking in an hour-long podcast even if your player supports it. Big thank you! Hope I had at least provided the inspiration so this message can get out. So, it is a short-file-only solution, which undercuts the purpose of seeking, that's why few people use it. On top of which, all we get is a German Wikipedia.https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xing-Header and a site in English, with prolly similar info, still pointing out the failures of mp3 seeking, which points to what for me is a dead linkhttps://second.wiki/wiki/xing-header This thread gives me clarity on the situation. And Porcus, the audio-on-demand attachment/file link when viewing the rss feed item, for which I'm also given a separate general URL which takes me to soundcloud's front-end, but once again for the former, is located in the followingfeeds.soundcloud.com/stream/<mp3file> While VBR can be high quality to upload it's also, at least outside of mp3, ubiquitous as the end result. Though perhaps I should've said I only saw it on 1 of my podcast subscriptions, of dozens, which happens to be the only 1 to use soundcloud. May have given the wrong impression by saying "Soundcloud" and not "Soundcloud for this one podcast" inadvertently through my own impression that VBR could be flawlessly done in mp3.