Dan Hsu? Hello? The cast on the Mobcast continues to be random so with no Dan Hsu or Greg Ford, Aaron Thomas hosts this week. The topics are a little inconsistent, but some funny stories arise.
The first topic centers around interesting interviews the group has done over the years. Michael interviewed Maggie Q and Aaron interviewed Shaq, both of which turned out a lot better than either expected. This moves into a quick discussion about sports game/EA haters.
MMOs that require actual twitch-based skill is glanced over quickly before the group talks about the recent trend of social network integration into games with the recent reveal that Uncharted 2 will include Twitter support. Do you want you games to automatically let you friends know that you beat the 3rd level boss? Games to go back to for the 1st time finish the cast with the requisite Ico getting mentioned.
On this episode of the Mobcast, the gang discuss their best and worst celebrity interviews, talk about why some folks hate on EA, ponder why there aren’t more MMORPG’s that require combat skill, argue about Twitter being integrated into games, and share the games they’d love to play again for the first time.
Runtime – 1:13:59
Links → [web] [mp3] [iTunes] [Zune] [rss]
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As much as I really appreciate the personalities over at Bitmob (I’ve done a tiny bit of blogging over there, myself), the low audio quality and ever-changing cast of hosts is really turning me off. I can take a little bit of inconsistency because I realize schedules are difficult to keep and podcasts are a lot of work, but it’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to think of unsubscribing.
What bitrate is it at? That kind of leads into an interesting discussion about what bitrate podcasts should be at. I listen to podcasts on the commute and I usually only have about 200MB free space on my MP3 player reserved for podcasts. I get really irritated with the IGN podcasts because for some reason they feel the need to encode their podcasts at 128kbp/s, making a one hour show over 50MB – a quarter of the total space. That means Game Scoop! and Beyond on there at once = no good for other shows.
64kbp/s should almost be an enforced standard for shows. If you’ve only got speech and occasional music, there is no problem with that. It also allows you to have a lot of shows on at once. Giant Bombcast is 2.5 hours @ 64kbp/s, sounds great, and is only 66MB. Compare that to IGN’s shows. Other radio shows that mix speech and music, like This American Life or Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me also run at 64kbp/s and sound completely up to scratch. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe runs at 44kbp/s and sounds fine!
Anyway, to conclude, 64kbp/s please.
As for Bitmob, maybe they just have bad audio gear? But, whatever, I’ve recorded with my MP3 player’s crappy microphone, and after a simple noise removal filter with Audacity recordings sound crystal clear. Therefore, I must shrug.
You bring up a fair point about the bitrate, though I suppose as somewhat of a “connoisseur” of podcasts, I always tend to leave plenty of room for podcasts on my MP3 player. Nonetheless, you are right – podcasts are hardly comparable to say, the Chopin and Vivaldi that I take pride in listening to in FLAC format. 96 kbits/sec might be a nice target, seeing as that’s the standard FM radio bitrate and provides a decent analogue.
But back to the Mobcast, I believe they just record over Skype from through one computer. It’s sad to see where the audio quality has gone since Robert Ashley produced the show, because recording over Skype from just one host computer makes it so all of the bandwidth hiccups and whatnot push right into the recording. I know that for our podcast we talk over Skype but record at our individual computers – by combining our recordings and doing some cleanup in post, I’d hope that we sound alright.
Hey guys, I’ve passed along your audio concerns to the Bitmob guys, so look for something a noticeable on next week’s podcast.
Now that’s service! Thanks, Derek. And for those of you that don’t know, Derek co-hosts the Pixel Revolt podcast on Bitmob.com, you should check it out!
http://pixelrevolt.libsyn.com/rss
Thanks for the plug! And now that you’ve mentioned it, to put my two cents in about the bitrate conversation, I encode our podcast at 96 kb/s off of a one computer Skype recording and I think it comes out sounding fine. I think Bitmob’s audio issues have been all hardware-based.