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

[tommer]

try encoding to .wma instead of .mp3's.

[wetcamelfood]

Originally Posted by tommer

try encoding to .wma instead of .mp3's.

OK, what software/programs do you recommend for this? MMJ, Goldwave, Razorlame & HP RecordNow (which are the ones I have) don't have the option for WMA for converting files (I could list the file types they do have availbale here but that seems pointless if I really need to try WMA), so let me know and then I'll give it a try, thanks tommer.

John

[tommer]

i highly recommend Easy CD-DA Extractor/Converter. you can also send me the files and i'll convert them for you.

[face of glass]

Originally Posted by wetcamelfood

OK, what software/programs do you recommend for this?

John, here's one program to solve most of those converting problems: http://www.dbpoweramp.com. You will have to download specific codecs for it, the program itself only comes with a handful. But the Windows Media Audio codec is available for download there too: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central.htm.

[face of glass]

John, also note that this link (http://www.audiohub.org/get/fa/sa.htm) says that less mp3 compression doesn't necessarily mean that the sound quality is better than that in the file with larger compression. In fact, they're roughly comparable in sound quality, that's at least the case with the higher bitrate mp3s. If we're speaking of bitrate as small as 32 then we've got some problems. I personally think it would be better to use 64, at least, that's usually pretty listenable. But if you can't get the files any smaller with no loss in audio quality then I suggest that you put in only 3-4 of them per a single discography entry, the ones that you think are the most representative of the albums. It's better than posting all of them and having bandwidth problems for most of the time.

I appreciate your efforts though, since I'm far from having listened to all the stuff in the discography.

[wetcamelfood]

Thanks Gaius & Tommer, I'll give these things a try tomorrow and report back progress here.

john

[wetcamelfood]

OK, I've done it with one. Now, when I attach it to an e mail, it says 990k for the size and when I mouse over the file in the bubble it says 746 KB and I'm sure the default was 64kbps, might have even been 48, but it wasn't bigger than 64 anyways.

So I think this boils down to what jwys_soapbox had said (which I noted above) how Marty is seening the files on his end as a different size. Please post here if anyone can elaborate on this angle as I'm completely lost on this and I'd like to be prepared on the topic when I go back to Marty about this (as I won't be in contact with him unti Thursday so I'd hope to have this topic fuly researched by then. I'd post the test clip I did here but I doubt it would fit as I know pics here don't work unless they're pretty small. Thanks in advance.

John

[wetcamelfood]

OK well the file was even bigger on Marty's end, seven hundred something K so whatever, just giving this thread a bump in the hopes someone can help out here as we're rather stuck on this now and we really hope we can work it out since it'd be such a great feature for the discography.

Please do chime in (or feel free to e mail or PM me) if you can help in any way on this, thanks in advamce.

John