Many different audio file formats exist for storing recorded audio data on a computer system. This post compares multiple file types and gives suggestions on which formats and bitrates one should use, especially when producing podcasts or other online audio.

We also added two listening examples to compare MP3, AAC and Opus files at various bitrates.

If you just want to see some practical tips, skip the description and read the conclusion.

UPDATE 2017:
The original article was updated to include the new Opus audio codec, concrete bitrate suggestions, audio examples at various bitrates and other recent developments!

Types ...

Some weeks ago I presented auphonic to the advisory board of the Science Park Graz, the local version of the Austrian incubator network AplusB.
Fortunately I am happy to announce, that the jury enjoyed the project and therefore auphonic is now part of the Science Park.

What are incubators?

AplusB (Academia plus Business) is the Austrian hightech incubator network. These incubators are linked to academic institutions, in my case the universities in Graz, and they support the development of technology-based projects for a period of 1.5 years.

Here a more detailed (and little bit cryptic) self-definition from the ...

As a Python or Django developer, various WSGI and webservers are available to deploy an application. A very fast, lightweight and relatively easy-to-install solution is the combination of Nginx, the high-performance HTTP server, and uWSGI (see benchmark of python WSGI servers). Furthermore, virtualenv and Fabric are invaluable tools to handle Python dependencies and to automate deployments.

This tutorial describes how to setup a Django 1.3, Nginx and uWSGI stack. My OS at the time of this writing was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Installing all requirements

First install all the handy python tools, if you don't have them already (maybe ...