iTunes Encoding Alternatives
Every couple of weeks I encode the audio for the Board of Education meetings of Lincoln Public Schools an publish them in a podcast. While iTunes works very well as an audio encoding tool, it can be frustrating when podcasting. My audio starts as a track in a quicktime movie. I export that movie as a AIFF file, giving me a very large (1GBish) audio document. I then put this file into iTunes, right-clicked on it and chose to encode it as an MP3. Once encoded, I would edit the ID3 tags to reflect the artist/album/genre that the rest of my podcast has. Now I have two files in my iTunes library. Once uploaded into my podcast (I use Podcast Maker) iTunes would pull a third copy of the file as a part of the subscription (you should always subscribe to your own podcast for quality-assurance purposes). Finally, I have to remember to clean out the garbage files and get everything back in order. A real mess, I think.
Last week I got very frustrated with this and tried the command line utilty LAME to compress my files. This worked very well. It was just a little usability-challenged. I wanted something that I didn't have to pull out an instruction book every time I used it.
Today, a new version of Max was released that does what I need it to do. Max is an audio encoder that only does audio encoding (and does it well). It has a lot of input and output options and can play nicely with a few other applications to do tagging and playing. I'm really hoping that this will finally allow me to do everything outside of iTunes and leave iTunes to do what it does best, organizing and playing audio files.
technorati tags:lame, podcastMaker, iTunes, mp3, encode