Now your audio on Anchor sounds better than ever
Starting today, you’ll notice an improvement to the overall audio quality of your Anchor episodes, including stereo sound, a higher sample rate, a better bitrate, and more. Basically, they’ll sound really, really great.
Hi there! I’m John, Anchor’s Head of Production, and I’m extremely excited to share a project we’ve been working on to make your podcasts sound better than ever. Since I started working here earlier this year, improving the audio quality of podcasts on Anchor has been a pet project of mine. Today, we’re introducing a huge upgrade in overall audio quality, and it gives you better control over the audio in your podcast. I’m an enormous nerd about audio, so I can’t overstate how excited I am about these improvements.
When we first launched Anchor, the app and the audio in it were designed for short clips and optimized for quick, responsive streaming. Now that Anchor is a full-fledged podcast platform, listeners download full episodes, and those episodes can contain all kinds of rich sound design, background music, and whatever else you choose to put in your podcast. So we’re really happy to introduce a huge upgrade to how all of that audio sounds.
Now, any audio you create on Anchor will be distributed in stereo at a higher bitrate and sample rate than before. It sounds great. And if you upload an .mp3 or .m4a segment and publish it directly as an episode, your original file will be served directly to your subscribers. This gives you complete control over your audio encoding, and you can add whatever extra metadata you want to your episode. (For you Forecast users out there: ID3 information and chapter data all stay intact on their way to the feed!)
Here are the Nitty Gritty Tech Specs For Nerds:
- Audio created on Anchor will now be encoded in stereo at 44.1 kHz, 128 kbit/s CBR
- The Anchor web player and embedded player will now play higher-quality versions by default
- Episodes which consist of a single segment that was uploaded as an .mp3 or .m4a file will pass that original file to your podcast feed
You can hear an example in this episode of our in-house podcast:
Along with these improvements, you’ll also start to hear better sound quality and more consistent volume across built-in transitions and background tracks. We’re remastering them to sound better than ever when combined with your original audio in our new quality profile.
We’re always looking for ways to improve the way podcasts are made and shared on Anchor, and upgrading our sound quality is something I’m personally really, really excited about (and stay tuned — we have more planned on this front). Try it for yourself, and if you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter, or check out “I Should Start a Podcast,” the show I host.
