Last weekend, 15. + 16. October 2011, the first austrian podcast barcamp (#pccvie) took place in the charming sektor5 coworking space in Vienna. We had really inspiring discussions with many local podcasters and technicians, for some detailed reports in german see Podcastcamp 2001 by Nico Grienauer and Podcast Barcamp: Ein tweetiger und booiger Rückblick by Robert Lender.
I just want to add some thoughts to the discussion about enhanced podcasts and will list some practical tools.

Enhanced Podcasts

It seems that more and more podcasters try to create enhanced podcasts, where additional metadata like chapter marks, hyperlinks or images, ...

After recording a podcast or speech audio, it is usually necessary to modify the recorded levels. This post illustrates how to normalize the subjective loudness and how to compress the dynamic range (= difference between the loudest and softest sounds) of an audio file.

Loudness normalization is one of the most common misunderstandings in audio post production. Many people use peak normalization, which ensures that the maximum peak (= the maximum value of the audio data) reaches a specific level. However, the human perception of loudness does NOT depend on peak levels, therefore peak normalization is mostly useless. Recordings should ...

Many different audio file formats exist for storing recorded audio data on a computer system. This post compares multiple file types and gives suggestions on which formats and bitrates one should use, especially when producing podcasts or other online audio.

We also added two listening examples to compare MP3, AAC and Opus files at various bitrates.

If you just want to see some practical tips, skip the description and read the conclusion.

UPDATE 2017:
The original article was updated to include the new Opus audio codec, concrete bitrate suggestions, audio examples at various bitrates and other recent developments!

Types ...