In my last post, I mentioned an anecdote about a customer issue that we dealt with at Pinecast. The customer had no upload surge remaining, and their MP3s were larger than the file upload limit for their plan. We addressed the customer’s immediate concerns, but I was curious why the customer’s MP3s are so large. When I dug in, I found that their editing software gave only the most basic of encoding options. I tried finding a simple piece of software that would solve this for them, but there were none — particularly for Windows, which the customer is using.

TL;DR MP3s are tough to get right, so we made Pinecoder. It’s experimental, so expect some rough edges and send us your feedback. ❤️

How bad could it be?

Right now, the most comprehensive, free way to encode an MP3 file is to use ffmpeg, or another interface for the LAME encoder. Let’s look at what it takes to get this set up on Windows.

Download the correct ffmpeg binary. For the average podcaster, this is already overcomplicated: how am I supposed to know whether I want static or shared linking? Extract the binary somewhere. That means putting the bin/ffmpeg.exe file somewhere that you’ll be able to find it. Open the command prompt. On Windows 10, Microsoft desperately wants you to not do this. The only way I found to actually open the command prompt is to type “cmd” in the start menu. Run a command like C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg -i source.wav -b 128 -ac 1 -o mixed.mp3 . I’m sure you’ll have no problem with ffmpeg’s command line options. Add ID3 tags. Ffmpeg doesn’t do this, so you’re on your own. I have yet to find a tool that works well enough for me to recommend.

Alright, that’s not ideal.

What if we use a piece of free software with a GUI? In that case, the only realistic solution is Audacity. I’m not fond of Audacity for a number of reasons, but a ton of people use it and it is free after all.

Download and install Audacity. This is thankfully much more straightforward than the ffmpeg download page. Open your source audio, and click File > Export Audio. So far so good. Choose your encoding settings. If you know what you’re doing here, you’ll be fine. The defaults here are aimed at musicians, not podcasters: the bitrate is high by default and mono is hidden behind the scary “Force export to mono” option.

Every sane human’s eyes just glazed over.

Simple enough! We click Save, and…

I beg your pardon?

So now we click Download to get a copy of LAME.

Click Download. This opens your browser to a wiki. I chose the first link for Windows. Follow the instructions, and go to the LAME download page. The note that “you can safely ignore any warnings that the ‘publisher could not be verified’” is only somewhat reassuring. Run the LAME installer. Don’t worry, you can safely ignore any warnings that “the publisher could not be verified.” Close the “Locate LAME” dialog and restart Audacity. You can fiddle in there to try to locate the DLL but it’s not worth it. Export your audio for real this time. Just go through the first set of steps and pretend that you weren’t just digitally violated by a piece of open source software.

This is simply awful, and sets a bad standard for editing and mixing software.

We can do better than this.