What Bitrate Should You Export Your Podcast At?

Bitrate determines the audio quality and file size of your exported podcast episode. Too low and it sounds compressed and lossy. Too high and you're wasting storage space and listener bandwidth for no audible improvement.

The Options Explained

Podcast audio is almost always exported in MP3 format (AAC is supported by some platforms but MP3 is universal). MP3 bitrate is typically measured in kbps (kilobits per second).

128 kbps: The minimum most podcasters should use. Acceptable quality for voice-only content. You may notice some artifacts on music or complex sounds, but for a conversation podcast it's usually fine. File size is approximately 1 MB per minute.

192 kbps: The sweet spot for most podcasts. Clean, clear voice quality. Music within episodes sounds good. File size is around 1.4 MB per minute.

320 kbps: Maximum quality for MP3. Essentially transparent for voice content — you won't be able to hear the difference between 320 and 192 kbps in a podcast context. File size is roughly 2.4 MB per minute. The higher file size means longer download times for listeners, slightly more storage cost on your host, and no practical quality benefit for spoken word content.

Mono vs. Stereo

Most podcast audio should be exported as mono, not stereo.

This surprises a lot of people. The reasoning: podcast listeners wear headphones with one earbud, or listen through a single phone speaker, or are in a car. True stereo imaging — where sounds are panned left and right — isn't experienced as stereo in most listening situations.

Mono audio at the same bitrate has higher quality than stereo because all the data budget is being spent on one channel instead of split between two. A 128 kbps mono file sounds better than a 128 kbps stereo file for voice content.

Stereo makes sense if your show has music, sound design, or content where the spatial dimension genuinely adds something. For interview and solo podcasts: mono at 128 kbps is entirely appropriate and often better than stereo at 192 kbps.

Platform-Specific Considerations

Spotify re-encodes uploaded audio to their own format regardless of what you upload. Apple Podcasts preserves your original file quality. Most hosting platforms recommend 192 kbps stereo as a catch-all submission format, which is fine — it handles any downstream re-encoding well.

The practical recommendation: export at 192 kbps mono for a pure speech podcast, or 192 kbps stereo if your show has music or stereo elements you want to preserve.