The Penguin needs some technical sound clip resizing advice!

[wetcamelfood]

Hi all,

Johnny Stew, estrangedforlife, jwys_soapbox and I are trying to help Marty with some
discography stuff here at the Penguin, particularly 30 second sound clips for the songs and
when I had submitted some clips as .mp3 files, he was getting them on his end at 175k
(which sounded fine by all accounts) and wondered if I could get them down to 100k (due
to bandwidth etc. since we’d hope to get thousands of them in there ) and Johnny Stew
kindly walked me through the "convert to mp3PRO function via MusicMatchJukebox
which we both use (thanks Johnny, and yup, I understood your instructions just fine ).
However, even after bringing a test clip down to 32kbps as an mp3pro file, and though it
brought it down to 125k, we still need to get it down some more and it sounded too
garbled. Naturally, we could cut some of the clip off to shrink it but we feel that any clip
less than 30 seconds is hardly worth the effort.

jwys_soapbox said: there is often a large difference between a file's size on my computer
and its size on a server. He says that when he posts a picture onto his site, he found that it
stores at a smaller size on his server than on his hard drive. We think that this is where we
should concentrate: in spite of the size our computer reports, how much size does the
server say? If there is a difference, maybe a rule of thumb can be developed that we can
use to determine the size of the file on the server based on the size reported by the
computer, program, etc. While a test using his own web space only resulted in a variation
of 2k of memory (the 122k file stored at 124k), maybe if we tested the files in question
this way, we’d find a definite filesize to solve the mystery about the actual file's size.

I must admit that this is way over my head so I hope some of you can jump in here with
suggestions and/or help of some kind.

estrangedforlife said: the trading people he deals with are no longer trading/using mp3's or
loading them up since the newer type of music files (flac/SHN/lossless/bit torrent/etc.)
have better quality even when compressed which mp3 will never have (The main problem
with the newer types of files is the use of programs to access the files).

Marty’s main concern is that he wants to use software and file types that are common so
that less people would need to download software in order to hear them, and I see his
point.

So, how can I get the clips down to 100k without losing quality (if possible)? Please do let
me know here as I/we really don't know much about this stuff and need some expert
advice to try and move forward on our project. Thanks in advance and looking forward to
your comments/suggestions on this topic here.

John