Tech Friday: Thoughts on M4A vs MP3 digital audio formats
Posted By RichC on April 22, 2022
The MP3 format for audio has been used on My Desultory Blog since the mid-2000s and I have contemplated a variety of other opensource options 
over the years. Compression choices to keep file sizes and streaming acceptable come and go and as we search for quality of audio and bandwidth for streaming becomes less of an issue, file sizes have grown. Recently after submitting a voice audio response using an iPhone, decided it was time to revisit the topic.
Since I already have an Apogee microphone on my two-monitor iMac setup, I started a little testing using the Apogee MetaRecorder app and dongle plug for the iPad and iPhone. In itself, the audio quality is an impressive improvement over the built in iPhone microphone or my Bluetooth headset, but it is definitely not as convenient. Since I’m not creating voice over audio or podcasts, it hardly seems worthwhile to use it for audio memos.
| Test ACC audio of the last paragraph saved as .m4a | 2022 |
| Test ACC audio of the last paragraph converted to .mp3 with audio gain adjustment | 2022 |
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