Yes, you heard correctly… The Bugcast is now available in high-quality Ogg Vorbis.

“Do what with a kipper?”

I know, it’s all gibberish right? Well not really. Ogg Vorbis is an audio compression format that is superior in quality to that of MP3 for similar file sizes.

Head along to the Listen page to see full details of all of the feeds available.

The technical stuff

Ogg Vorbis is preferred in many circles for not being governed by patents and licensing agreements. It’s free (in both senses of the word) and totally open. Oggcasting is a subgroup of podcasting, where the podcast itself is only available in Ogg Vorbis format. Whilst I would love to go down that route, it shuts out a lot of listeners as mainstream media players (including, but not limited to, the iTouch and iPhone) do not support the Ogg file format.

So my compromise (and knowing that a number of existing listeners will be switching to the Ogg feed) is to offer both MP3 and Ogg versions of The Bugcast.

Please just be aware that because we’ve only just started recording the show in the lossless format, FLAC, Ogg versions of the show are only available from episode 145 onwards. I saw little point in creating Ogg versions of those shows that were originally recorded in MP3 as there would be no quality benefit in doing so.

I’ve already noticed a significant quality increase in the MP3 version of the show since recording the show to FLAC, so I know that the Ogg version will be much better! For the geeks amongst you, the both the MP3 and Ogg versions of the show are compressed at 160kbps, so the file sizes are fairly similar.