You may have noticed that we here at the Modern Technology Podcast Network are big fans of Free Content. All our podcasts are freely licensed under Creative Commons terms which not only ensure that our content is available free of charge and will always remain so, it is also allowed to be freely republished, rebroadcast, and – should anyone get a wild hair to do so – remixed into something new.
Bringing our output formats a little more in line with that particular goal, in addition to our normal podcast feeds we are now archiving high-quality FLAC files of each episode to our page on the Internet Archive. For those unfamiliar, FLAC is a digital-audio standard producing files which are compressed in file-size but, unlike the podcast-standard MP3 files which go out in our podcast feeds, they are lossless. These FLACs are the files we initially produce our shows as, from which we make the lossy MP3s that go out into our podcast streams.
We behind the scenes have long been supporters of the Internet Archive and their work, and they are the perfect place for us to archive the small chunk of the Internet Modern.Technology creates. People interested in rebroadcasting, republishing, or remixing our work in line with our Creative Commons licenses can now find it in a format which can be further edited and re-exported without any loss in fidelity.
Listeners not interested in FLAC have nothing to worry about; we’ll keep posting and podcasting our normal MP3s as we always have. You still get the full show in the MP3s, there’s nothing extra added to the FLACs. This is merely an additional sharing venue for our episodes which makes the audio geek segment behind the scenes of this network very happy, and hopefully will do the same for the audio geek segment out there among you.
From now on, you can generally expect our archival FLACs to be posted within a day or so of our podcast MP3s.
