Back in the day when podcasting was still just a gleam in the eyes of geeks, two companies launched to give people the ability to do live radio shows. One was TalkShoe and the other was Blog Talk Radio. I have NOT been a fan of either one for a very simple reason. Their audio blows. I mean it sucks out loud, and by that I mean it's bad. It's horrible. It sounds like you recorded you podcast under water with someone frying bacon in the background. I hope you get my hint.
If you look at the graphic to the right you will see the details of a file I downloaded from the Blog talk University (so an “official” BTR file) and you will see that the sample rate is 11. The typical CD quality sample rate is 44. Think of it this way, how many times a second do they take a picture of your sound wave. Another great way of thinking of this is by using the analogy of paint. How much paint do they put on their brush? 1/4 of what most people use.
Then you get to the Audio Bit Rate. Back in the day when people were worried about bandwidth (a worry that is almost obsolete) people would publish at
64 Kbps = Am Radio Quality if stereo.
96 = FM Radio Quality (I still publish at his rate for some of my podcasts)
128 =CD Quality
You can see that after barely putting any “paint” on their paint brush they then publish the audio with HALF of the quality of an AM Radio station.
As I was listening to this show, I thought, “I'm going to write a blog post about it.” I didn't want to lose my place so I clicked the “Play in a new window” option and well. I'm still waiting. I get this a lot when I go to help people who want to move away from Blog Talk Radio. I finally had to click on pause and start to get the player to work.
With this in mind, as it is my job to know and understand all podcasting tools, I will be using BTR in the future to make sure I know what I'm talking about. If you want to be notified you can follow me on twitter at @learntopodcast and I'll let you know. Right now I'm set for this Wednesday at 10 AM.
When I visit their site, it is filled with ads. Now the fun thing is, many of those ads were paid for by the other hosts. That's right instead of finding advertisers who want to sponsor your show, they charge you to sponsor other people's shows. It's part of their “publicity” that they provide. If you take their class on podcast promotion it amounts to (in my opinion) use Facebook and Twitter. Really? Wow. I never would've thought of that.
Maybe the thrill of having a live audience will offset the lack of audio quality. I'm also going to pay CLOSE attention as to how and if they submit a feed to iTunes as a “favor” for me. See this video to help explain how you can get married to BTR without a way of getting out of a very bad marriage.
There may be hope for BTR in the future as I saw this on one of their forums.
With this in mind I urge you NOT to use these services (or Podbean for that matter). If you need help, I have resources, and a quick start plan that will cost you less than $10 to start.
Do you know if it is possible to migrate an RSS feed that is hooked up to iTunes from a BlogTalkRadio account to a self-hosted podcast?
You would need to put a “new rss” tag into the rss feed. Being that this comes from blog talk radio, and being that they know what that “new rss” tag would move you away from them, I doubt it. That’s why I use feedburner and submit my feedburner feed to iTunes. Then if I want to change something, I pupdate feedburner which updates iTunes.
Seeing as though the foundation of BTR is audio and sound, it would stand to reason that more focus would be given to the QUALITY of that audio and sound. Nearly every show I’ve listened to on BTR sounds horrible, including the ones hosted by BTR staff. Just doesn’t make sense to me, especially when you have to pay approx. $40-$250 per month for premium features, but then receive way-less-than-premium sound.
If we provide a decent quality audio our profits go down and I can’t go on writing shit poetry you morons.
After my wife left me because of my small penis I take it out on others because I was a bully victim at school and had to ride the short yellow bus.
David,
How many callers can you have on your $10 quick start plan? Talking is one thing but an interactive platform is another. Cannot support multiple guests and handle callers at the same time? I have listened to my btr shows and they sound fine. Btr is the only platform I have seen that has a call in number to your show. Try to explain Skype to a 75 year old veteran who can barley use a computer……..
Lost hope radio … ( I mean blog talk rado) still ruining perfectly good shows.
jackn, I would love for you to try out the new system that is in mass beta right now, email me at andy (at) blogtalkradio (dot) com, and we’ll get you hooked up. We’ve been trying to get folks who absolutely hated the old system to test the new one so we can get the harshest possible judgement and would love for you to kick the tires.
Additionally, many podcasters on our platform prefer to use their own recording set-up and not our virtual studio. Many of these podcasters simply use our studio as a recording rig to record multiple remote guests and download those recordings for post production. These podcasters upload their fully finished episodes (on an unlimited basis even with our lowest hosting plan), which are then distributed in 128kbps everywhere (on our site, their sites, and via RSS to itunes and many other channels).
Contrary to many rumors (in part because of the prior opaqueness of our legalese), BTR hosts have ALWAYS owned the copyrights to their content, our hosts simply license their content to us to distribute on their behalf (same with most social and blogging sites).
If it was not consistently abided by before my watch (I joined in Jan 2014), we’ve since set it further in stone by completely overhauling our terms to fully commit the company to fairer dealings, and also made it a point to make the ownership clause clearer thanks to a discussion on the podcast community discussions that pointed us to the source of the misunderstanding within the previous version. Since launch of those new terms, we’ve made one further revision based on feedback from our hosts.
It’s a very different team from top to bottom now, and while we may have disappointed a good number of you before, we would be privileged to have the opportunity to win back your trust.
Sincerely,
Andy Toh
GM/Chief Architect
BlogTalkRadio