Compression Techniques for Audios

[speierg]

Hey guys, I'm looking for some help in making my AC files as small as possible, without ruining the quality, so that people can more easily download them. Any tips?

I'm using Audacity to record the audio. I usually import .mp3 files for the intro and outro music. Then I record my voice as a separate track. I've scaled the sample format down to 16-bit to try to make the files smaller. However, when I try to change the rate of a track (from 44100 Hz to anything less) it changes the pitch and makes everything sound, err, Satanic? :crazy:

I've also set the compression in winzip to maximum (portable) to get better compression on that end of things.

With all that however, the AC I just recorded still weighs in (with the replay file and a tiny text file zipped in with it) at just under 16 MB. It's about 27.5 minutes long, so I'm not sure why the file size is so large.

Anything you guys do to shrink the file-size down that I should be doing? I appreciate your help.

And I hope to get this AC posted real soon.

Thanks.

[Piscinex]

Try saving it in mono, not stereo, that will reduce the filesize slightly.

Zipping will do next to nothing because mp3s compress very heavily anyway (I imagine Blizzard's replay format compresses quite heavily too because the filesize is tiny).

For an audio commentary you could get away with a low bitrate like 32kbps. I'm not sure what you mean by 16-bit though, do you mean 16kbps? If so it should not be 16mb for 27 min, more like 3mb...

[speierg]

Thanks for the help. I found the bit rate option and lowered it to 16000Hz. This chopped my file size down to an acceptable level (although the quality isn't quite as good, it's probably a pretty decent balance between quality and ease of DL).