So I'm trying to re-encode my archive of radio three sixty, a music podcast I love(d) and kinda defined a lot of my tastes in music, even today. The problem is that the original files are all Apple Enhanced Podcast files. [Here's a quaint feeling article from make:magazine from 2008](https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/how-to-make-enhanced-podc/) that talks about it, but essentially it's an m4a container that contains an AAC audio stream (with variable bit rate), along with chapter information and album art (maybe per chapter). VLC for Android plays these just fine, but it treats them like a video (so it goes fullscreen) and I'd prefer to have them play as plain audio. So the question is: what format should I convert them to? I considered extracting the AAC audio (or re-encoding) and using that, but it seems like a slightly odd format that is probably going to play in most places in 2024, but I kinda want to put it into a format that will play everywhere. I'm not an audiophile, so I eventually settled on mp3. Now, doing research lead me to discover that mp3 supports both constant bit rate (CBR) which is kind of what everything uses and was the only thing I was aware of. There's also variable bit rate (VBR), which saves some space and is probably supported everywhere in this day and age (and may even be a requirement of the spec?). But I want a truly universal format so I'm going to use 192kbps mp3s. There's a lot of articles on bit rates like: - https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=LAME#Recommended_encoder_settings - https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/MP3 https://img.ly/blog/ultimate-guide-to-ffmpeg/ has been good for examining the files and messing around with stuff. I'm gonna need to edit all the metadata too