Usually, I delete podcasts after having listened to them, but it's not infrequent for me to want to save a particular episode of a podcast. However, I don't want these saved episodes to show up in the podcast list; I want them to show up with the rest of my spoken word tracks. Ideally, I'd love them to show up in the Audiobooks library section, but since almost none of my spoken word tracks show up there, and I don't want to risk losing quality by converting my mp3s to AAC, I'll settle for them showing up in the Music section with the rest of my Spoken Word genre. (At least until someone at Apple figures out that the Spoken genre is a better indicator than file type of whether something is music or an audiobook. *rolls eyes*)
So, I finally sat down to move some of these saved eps out of the podcast list into the music library. The first step in this is to convert the files to mp3s (even though they're already mp3s) to avoid iTunes continuing to treat them as podcasts. The first thing I noticed was that, contrary to other users' experience, this was the ONLY step needed to make iTunes stop treating them as podcasts. Okay, great, I figured. Maybe 7.0.2 had fixed the stupidity that had previously made this require several annoying steps. Then I noticed this:
The new converted mp3 was listed with a much higher file size and bit rate.
Now, my import settings are set to automatically use VBR, but how on earth can it get a 196 bit rate out of a file that was originally only 128?
Any idea what's going on here? The episodes I'm saving frequently have less-than-hot audio quality, so I'm really worried about losing what little they have. But I also don't have time to re-listen to every single episode trying to figure out if it really has lost quality if the iTunes bit rate info is unreliable.
So, I finally sat down to move some of these saved eps out of the podcast list into the music library. The first step in this is to convert the files to mp3s (even though they're already mp3s) to avoid iTunes continuing to treat them as podcasts. The first thing I noticed was that, contrary to other users' experience, this was the ONLY step needed to make iTunes stop treating them as podcasts. Okay, great, I figured. Maybe 7.0.2 had fixed the stupidity that had previously made this require several annoying steps. Then I noticed this:
The new converted mp3 was listed with a much higher file size and bit rate.
Now, my import settings are set to automatically use VBR, but how on earth can it get a 196 bit rate out of a file that was originally only 128?
Any idea what's going on here? The episodes I'm saving frequently have less-than-hot audio quality, so I'm really worried about losing what little they have. But I also don't have time to re-listen to every single episode trying to figure out if it really has lost quality if the iTunes bit rate info is unreliable.
