The ATP theme song by Johnathan Mann is unexpectedly awesome, and I never ever skip it. And as Marco pointed out in the ATP episode, this also affects any musical interludes or short musical samples within any podcast.

Yeah, I'm sure lots of people listen to it all the way through. I did for a while myself. But it's not worth inconveniencing so many of your listeners just to make your theme song (or very occasional clips) sound a tiny bit better — especially considering the fact that most people listen to podcasts in their car or even through the iPhone speaker, as Marco himself discovered from his analytics. Others have already noted that the easy solution to this problem exists in the form of AAC, which is supported ubiquitously at this point. Another solution is to just use 128kbps CBR; a 1.3x size increase is really not that big of a big deal, and 128 is transparent for many use cases.

Marco's solution is way, way out of proportion to the actual "problem". You'd think the guy who so often kvetches about Apple prioritizing design over function would know better than to make the same mistake!

Also: I know you don't air your dirty laundry in front of your audience, but I'm a bit disappointed that a careful and analytical engineer like Siracusa didn't call Marco out on this nonsense. (Especially after the .marcosweirdformat discussion, which was downright comical given the inconsequential nature of the problem in the first place.)

What nonsense? He explicitly said in the episode that he studied some options and they were all bad ideas. He made a few million from the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo, has FU money in the bank and he is just scratching an itch and exploring his hobby. I don't see anything wrong with that.

The nonsense is that this is a solution looking for a problem. It's scratching an itch by trying to move a mountain. I am certain that nobody in the history of the podcast has ever complained about the sound quality of the theme song or audio clips, especially after they switched over to 96kbps. Whereas there is no doubt that any technical solution — especially any of the ones proposed, including switching to VBR — would inconvenience a whole lot of people.

(By all means, Marco should continue working in this direction if it interests him. If Apple ends up adding those ID3 tags to their MP3 decoder, it will have a net positive impact on the world. I just think it's a rather foolish endeavor.)

>I am certain that nobody in the history of the podcast has ever complained about the sound quality of the theme song or audio clips, especially after they switched over to 96kbps.

Source?

>Whereas there is no doubt that any technical solution — especially any of the ones proposed, including switching to VBR — would inconvenience a whole lot of people.

It sounded to me like the entire point of his approach is to find a technical solution without inconveniencing people.

"a 1.3x size increase is really not that big of a big deal" - you say this about Marco "All my image resources are vectors so the OverCast App is 5 Megabytes large" Arment? For the same reason that UTF-8 is awesome, VBR podcasts are likewise a perfect system, presuming we can get over the chapter marking hurdles.

Not vector, but drawn by code.

I've always divided 2D graphics of the kind you see in Apps (let's ignore 3D Graphics cards with shaders/textures/etc.. for a bit) into two categories - bitmap and vector graphics. Bitmap is pretty straighforward, and vector graphics (googling for a second) is "...the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygons" - which presumably Marco is doing to keep his app size so small?

It sounds like he got into it because it piqued his interest so he did a deep dive on the subject. Nothing wrong with that. I will get frustrated with people sometimes for not doing things that they ought to be doing, but I would never sh*t on someone for following their bliss and spending their hobby time on things I personally am not interested in. If this pisses you off then I can't imagine what sort of vitriol you would direct at someone who is into, say, quilting. "Aren't quilts solved problems already?!? You just go down to Target and buy one, WTF people!"

When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem is to ask people to bug Apple engineers about adding new features to a decade-old encoder, maybe you're on the wrong track.

I'm frustrated by Marco's extreme fussiness, not his curiosity. (And there's no doubt his curiosity often leads to interesting places. I learned some great tidbits about MP3 encoding in the last few episodes!)

> When your solution to an incredibly minor and easily-solvable problem

What solution is that which he didn't mention? He mentioned AAC, custom formats, just do it and ignore the share link issues (LOVE the share links).

I'm referring to the article. I presume that if Apple ends up supporting MLLT ID3 tags natively based on Marco's request, he'll feel free to switch his podcast to VBR without guilt. (Even though this will cause problems for all his non-iOS11 listeners.)

I think you are the one over-reacting really. Marco spent some serious effort investigating something interesting to him and discovered a hole in some important software infrastructure. We can argue about how important the hole is, but there's no doubt it's a hole and filling it in wouldn't inconvenience anybody.

Less seriously, why would you skip over the song? - it's a lovely little song and my only problem with it is that it's an earworm that I find myself internally singing all the time. "John didn't do any research .... da da da". Of course John always does some research anyway. Now if only John would occasionally concede a point or give the other two some credit, maybe just once, life would be perfect.

I mean, we're almost at 200 episodes at this point! Kudos to Jonathan Mann for writing a song that seemingly never gets old, but at this point it just feel like I'm brainwashing myself into remembering a bunch of Twitter handles.

It's not just improving the quality of the theme song, it's decreasing the size of podcasts. A 10-20% reduction in bandwidth costs isn't anything to sneeze at, especially for larger distributors like relay.fm etc.

Theme song by Michael Mann is one of the highlights of the podcast for me (Up there with finding out if Casey Liss's iMac is still crashing) - and, regardless of where I am in the world, I always enjoy singing along to it - though I do moderate if there are people around me; I have never once even been tempted to skip it, and any effort that goes into enhancing it is effort well spent (at least for this audience of one).