I saw a reference to Dave Pentecost's podcasts from the South American jungles on Echo Radio recently. I was interested in that, having exchanged email with Dave in the past and being fascinated with Central and South America. I subscribed to the feed and in a rarity for me, I set iPodderX to get all the files in the feed. There's some really good stuff in here, including some stuff I'm going to quote in future shows.

My one big question - what the hell is up with the bit rate of these MP3s? I'm listening to the show about gender issues which is encoded at 256 kbps! That makes this 30 minute MP3 of two people talking a 55 Mb file, which is ridiculous. One episode I heard was them talking about how podcasts are too long. Dudes, your podcasts are too big!