Podcast formats

Podcasts can be in any number of audio formats—as long as someone can listen to it on their computer or handheld audio device. But, by far, the most common podcast format is MP3. This is a compressed file format. Compressed formats mean that the quality of the recorded audio is lowered in order to make the file size smaller, but the lost quality won't be noticeable by most people. Also, in this case, it exports an audio file into a single file that is easy to share with others. We'll learn how to export in MP3 format, and discuss other formats that might be useful.

The term—or audio file extension—MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. At a very high level this is an audio compression standard used when exporting audio. The file sizes are small, and it is easy to send these files through e-mail, or post them on an Internet site for someone to download.

Compression means that all of the audio is combined and exported to a single file. The quality is reduced by using lower bitrates...