i'm thinking of starting a #lowfi podcast called "peers of cypherspace", or "peers" or "cypherspace" or "PoC" (a play on people of color)

60 min conversations with people in the verse in beyond. i've listened to about 240 hours of podcasts over the last two years and really like the unedited conversational ones the most (i.e. the least well produced). perhaps with some intro tunes.

would this be of interest to any of the listeners out there?

cc: #naming-party

themes:

• sociotechnical communities . a.k.a what goes in is what comes out
• diversity in cypherspace
• comparisons to web 2.0
• web 2.0 is broken for most folx on the planet and how we might learn from those lessons in cypherspace
• who is building p2p and how did they get there
• who has arrived into p2p and how did they get there
• tips, thoughts and tales about keeping your secrets secure
• has being in this new space changed your synaptic pathways?
• lessons we can learn from the elders of the internet(s)
• connections to wider ecosystems
• who constitutes a human peer in cypherspace

feel free to ask questions about these themes and add some of your own which you think would fit under the title of:

"Peers of Cypherspace"

• cypherspace as a space of democratising the super powers available from web 2.0

• what do we even mean by peer?

cc: #peers-of-cypherspace

I don't feel totally comfortable endorsing a riff of PoC, but the word Cypherspace is soooo rich and intriguing.

happy to have a cypherspace naming-party

will start a new thread soon - i also felt similar to the PoC riff after having press send

Peers of Cypherspace Podcast #naming-party

come and play!

@nanomonkey "have you looked into the Opus Codec for doing lofi podcasts? I think it would be a great option, as you can get an hours worth of content into a few mb."

no! i'm a n00b other than listening to them - so throw all the protips at me!

(I should mention my partner runs podcasting workshops - so I will be able to bug them to teach me a thing or two ;) )

I have created a tech how to thread for technical discussions:

Opus Audio Codec :: How To :: Making lowfi podcasts

here is some inspiration for a podcast which does a portrait of each guest:

https://epicenter.tv/

Super exciting! :)

@cblgh hey!

how would you feel about gifting the into music to the podcast!?

@zelf if I understand correctly, then yes!

For me personally I really love the unedited conversational stream version of podcast. I can also imagine making one like this :)

I would also be super happy if someone wanted to take the raw material and use it as part of edited podcasts, remixed in, like modules. That would be really interesting actually.

Lastly, my hope is that if we can figure out a super lowfi way of recording conversations then "The Local Gossip" might be something to which other people upload their conversations too...

@flpvsk in your experience would something like this rhodes mic be sufficient to make a recording using an android/iphone which would be useful.

Lastly, do you have much experience with compression algorithms... what is the absolutley smallest we can get an hour long recording whilst still making it listenable?

@flpvsk I am thinking what I'll likely do is get both sides record their sides, release a compressed version of each (people can choose wihch side they listen to with the better clearer recording) and then both of the wavs (higher quality) can then be released in the event anyone wants to use the raw materials for parts of other podcasts ;)

Main thing at this time is to record some conversations rather than making as well a produced one as yours @flpvsk :D I've a tendency towards overwhelm, so the best way to navigate this is to steer the currents of "good enough"

@dan hassan

what is the absolutley smallest we can get an hour long recording whilst still making it listenable?

Define "listenable".

Have you heard samples of Opus or Codec2? I originally heard about Codec2 in this blog post and the audio samples blew me away. An hour of audio weighing in at just over 1 MB. Modern vocoders are incredibly impressive.

@christianbundy radio phone in qualaity listenable...

I am going for this listen-ability as my benchmark: http://expandingmind.podbean.com/

It is what I consider lowfi. It has an intro track and then gets into conversation. Some episodes the quality is better than others

@dan hassan

Easy! I downloaded one of the podcasts (ExMind_071218.mp3) and it looks like it's for 58:44 at of audio at 192 kb/s, weighing in around 81 MB. I converted it over to Opus at 24 kb/s and it sounds great at 10.8 MB. Here's a link if you want to check it out:

https://send.firefox.com/download/4c97a412b5/#FSkPozrY9jvlMhgnqFfC6w

When you say you converted it - which tool did you use? ffmeg? What was the command you ran from the command line? :D Asking for a friend

@christianbundy that is almost exactly the same! I wonder how small we could make it and still listenable...

81 -> 10 is pretty awesome

Thats like 12.5 % the size....

Unbelievable, right?

Here's the same file at 6 kb/s: Exmind_071218.opus

Only 3.1 MB and I have no trouble making out what they're saying. Not exactly the best music compressor, but small. It's crazy to think that Codec2 can chop it another 2/3 down to < 1 MB.

CC: @dan hassan

(I think Scuttlebutt did something weird to my link above, VLC should open it just fine, or you can rename to whatever.opus)

@christianbundy the quality of that being kinda choppy and like it is through a fishbowl .... is that the sound of solarpunk? as small as possible but still functional?

or is that craptastic for the sake of craptastic?

@dan hassan

When you say you converted it - which tool did you use? ffmeg? What was the command you ran from the command line? :D Asking for a friend

Sorry, didn't originally see this message! If your FFmpeg has libopus support you should be able to do it like this:

ffmpeg -i ./ExMind_071218.mp3 -acodec libopus -b:a 6k -vbr on -compression_level 10 ./ExMind_071218.opus

Alternatively, you can install opus-tools (if you're on Arch Linux this should be easy) and do the conversion from MP3 to WAV to Opus:

ffmpeg -i ExMind_071218.mp3 ExMind_071218.wav
opusenc --bitrate 6 ExMind_071218.wav ExMind_071218.opus

The music is completely terrible, but that's only because the compression algorithm is specifically optimized for the human voice. IMO the rest of the podcast sounds great.

is that the sound of solarpunk? as small as possible but still functional? or is that craptastic for the sake of craptastic?

Personally, I don't think there's a single sound of solarpunk. I generally keep three types of audio:

• Lossless: I keep lossless (FLAC) versions of all of my audio on an external hard drive. The files are gigantic, but sometimes it's nice to listen to the source material. Keeping the source material also makes it painless to re-compress files when magical new compression algorithms come out.
• General: My phone and laptop are small and portable, so I compromise with lossy (OGG) versions of most of my audio. The sound quality isn't perfect, but most songs still sound great with a touch of audio compression.
• Voice: Most general compression algorithms are fine for most audio, but when it comes to audiobooks and podcasts that are 99% human voice I'm personally fine corrupting the rest of the audio to the point where music is unlistenable. I love Opus, but eventually Codec2 may have enough software support to become a contender.

Here's the same podcast with Codec2:

• 3200 b/s (1.4 MB): ExMind-3200.c2
• 2400 b/s (1.1 MB): ExMind-2400.c2

If your FFmpeg was compiled with Codec2 support you should be able to convert them into whatever file format you like, otherwise you can install Codec2 and play them with:

c2dec 3200 ExMind-3200.c2 - | play -t raw -r 8000 -e signed-integer -b 16 -

Just in case you don't want to recompile FFmpeg or install Codec2 () you can get the worst of both worlds here: https://send.firefox.com/download/c4d2bbc8c9/#d76O8ZdxXuVdVo3SZ68pug

That's right -- the audio quality of a 1.4 MB file packaged up in a 56 MB file. Apparently it's tough work trying to store a pitch-perfect version of every compression artifact!

I've been exposed to new evidence and I'd like to correct a statement I made above.

sometimes it's nice to listen to the source material

Turns out that it's incredibly unlikely that anyone can actually tell the difference between lossless and reasonably-lossy audio. Lossless formats like FLAC are only useful because it allows you to archive the original file and re-encode when you want them in another format, but that's about it.

cc: @dan hassan

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