Graceful Spark, a big orange draft pony with a blonde-to-orange mane and tail, a pink streak over her left violet eye, and a nick out of her ear, cuddles with Spilled Beans, a wine-red unicorn with a coffee-colored mane and tail. Beans is resting against Spark's chest fluff and looking at her with those big blue eyes. Spark has a heart struck through with circuitry on her flank, while Beans as a cup of coffee spilled on a piece of paper.

We Were Hit By A Horse Truck And Got Isekai'd Into Equestria?

Two of the gayest horses on Celestia's green Earth are stuck here until we podcast our way through every episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Anchor
Episodes
RSS
email us at [literally anything]@isekai.horse

Graceful Spark's Nerd Node on Audio Formats

When I upload the podcast to Anchor (or, I guess, Spotify for Creators), I export a FLAC file and let Anchor convert it into an AAC .M4A file. This gets linked to in their RSS feed, which I'm sure you can download if you want. This part is out of my control, but, worry not, I have way more detail on the other stuff. AAC is pretty well-supported, since it's what the iPod likes, but it's also patent-encumbered and not that much better than MP3.

In addition to the Anchor uploads, we provide direct downloads via the Episodes link up there. The first season uploads use the Vorbis codec in the Ogg container format. If your audio player claims to support "Ogg Vorbis" or something similar, it should work. From season 2 on, we use the superior Opus codec in the same Ogg container format. The .opus extension is recommended for audio-only OGG Opus files, but I find support for it is spotty in practice, even on systems that support Opus audio. I've had friends report success after simply renaming the .opus files to .ogg so their audio player can understand them.

If you're wondering why I care so much, it's because Opus audio provides way better sound quality at a much smaller size than something like an MP3. My fondness for free formats helps, too.

I try my best to keep the metadata on the uploaded files uniform and correct, by the way. If I change how I do something, I try to go back and update the other files so they're consistent.

Long story short:

Season 1 episodes are all Ogg Vorbis. Basically everything under the sun supports Ogg Vorbis with the .ogg extension, so that's unlikely to be a problem.
Season 2 and beyond are all Ogg Opus. If your audio player (be it software or hardware) was made or last updated after 2012, there's a good chance it supports Opus audio, but it might insist on you changing the extension to .ogg or .oga.
In my experience, most vendors don't seem to understand or care about the difference between Vorbis (old deprecated codec), Opus (cool new codec), and Ogg (container format that can hold Vorbis, Opus, and/or something else entirely). Sometimes you'll see digital audio players advertise that they support "Ogg", which is meaningless by itself. Usually, that means they support Vorbis, but they may surprise you with Opus support, too. I've seen vendors on their own support forums say "I think we support Opus? I've never checked." Most folks tend to lump Ogg, Vorbis, and Opus together as "weird foss nerd audio", despite Opus being far and away the best lossy codec available today.
If all else fails, a little ffmpeg -i inputfile.opus outputfile.mp3 never hurt. I won't tell anypony you're throwing some quality away.

We Were Hit By A Horse Truck And Got Isekai'd Into Equestria?

Long story short:

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