What would be the best bitrate?

If you read my last post you’ll have realised that I’m on the lookout for new things to go in our store. Whilst thinking about it I realised that there are loads of great episodes of shows that aren’t available on our rss feeds any more. They would go great in the store and people would get the chance to hear some quality content that is otherwise unavailable.

As always, Your with the conent we sell, I like to make it at a higher quality than it was when we offered it for free. Traditionally that means raising the bit rate of the mp3 file that you download. The first two years of Movies You Should See was sold at a bitrate of 328kbps, which was far too high. Then year there came out at a bit rate of 256kbps, which I think is still too high, but it’s the same as a music track that you’d get from iTunes.

It’s important to remember that all our content is spoken word rather than music so it doesn’t need to be as high a bit rate. Because of this we’ve been selling SHaFT at 128kbps. In the six months we’ve been selling it has never been a single complaint about the quality of the audio.

When I put lots of new content in the store over the next few days I intend to have it at the same rate of compression as SHaFT, as I think it provides a compromise between sounds quality and file size that offers good value for money.

I’d love to know what you all think about this issue. Is the compression rate of SHaFT acceptable? Do you even care? It might just be me that gets obsessed about this sort of thing.