Should You Use WAV or MP3 Files for Your Podcast Audio?

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I'm Danny Brown,

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and you're listening to One Minute Podcast Tips,

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the show that helps you be a better podcaster

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in just a minute a week.

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If you want more specific tips just for you in your podcast,

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check out the Magic Mic membership

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at oneminutepodcasttips.com/support.

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And now, this week's episode.

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In last week's episode,

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I shared how to get the best audio quality

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before you even start recording.

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and I'll leave a link to that in the show notes so you can check that episode out.

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But when it comes to the quality of your audio file, what should you use?

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Should you use WAV or MP3?

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While it's true that WAV files are better quality than MP3 files,

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that's not the case if the WAV file is being compressed.

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So if you do use a WAV file, make sure it's lossless and that's the best quality for recording.

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However, when it actually comes to publishing your episodes,

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I always recommend MP3 files and there's a few reasons for that.

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But the main one is the size of the file.

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Because of the higher quality, WAV files are a lot larger than MP3 files.

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If you took an average 30 minute episode that didn't have a huge bitrate or sample rate,

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then you're looking at about 30MB for an MP3 file.

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For a WAV file on the other hand, you're looking at 300MB.

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If you're looking at an hour episode, the MP3 file becomes 60MB,

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while the WAV file jumps up to 600MB.

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And because of that extra data, it can actually cause playback issues on podcast apps.

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Apple Podcasts, for example, won't allow episodes that are over 150MB in size to be downloaded to someone's cell device if using their cell phone data.

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This is to protect the listener's data plan from not being impacted too much by the size of the episode download.

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So, as a general rule, record and edit in WAV, and then export and publish in MP3.

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Until the next time, happy podcasting.

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Thanks for listening.

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Until the next time, happy podcasting.

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