November 27, 2008
Singapore Gives Thanks
November 27, 2008
Thanksgiving Thoughts
November 27, 2008
Emperor, Clothes, etc.
November 27, 2008
Letter of Law, Spirit of Law
November 26, 2008
Different Forms of Government
November 26, 2008
Roderick Long and the Tiny Gnomes from Neptune
November 26, 2008
When You're in a Hole, Keep Digging
November 26, 2008
Singapore's Policy Secret: Economic Literacy, Deference, or Resignation?
November 26, 2008
Notes on McArdle's Law
There are lot's, but I use iTunes. If you encode in mono at 16 kbs, which I do for some talk radio programs, an hour's worth is around 7 MB.
You might try lame, if the licensing is not an issue. http://lame.sourceforge.net/using.html
Something like: lame -b 32 infile.wav outfile.mp3 will result in a quite small mp3. See
http://lame.sourceforge.net/USAGE for more info about various options. Size is of course traded for quality.
Hey. I got all eight right.
As usual, I find open-source based software hard to figure out. The best I could do with one LAME-based tool I downloaded was slightly worse than what I could do with something called Coffee Cup rip-and-burn. That is, the file was slightly larger with the open source stuff. But I have no idea how to optimize the open source stuff.
I think that if one could set the bitrate rate from 32 k down to 8 k it might help. But I don't know how to do that, and it's just a guess, anyway.
You should reduce the sampling rate to 12 kHz in order to get small file sizes. In doing so, you remove all frequencies above 6 kHz, which will not adversely affect the intelligibility of the recording; on the other hand, it will make high-frequency artifacts from the Olympus files less obvious. Using LAME, the following is pretty good for spoken recordings:
lame --resample 12 -b 24 -m m
That'll be a mono file at 24 kbps.
There are several good solutions for low bit-rate audio. A recent test of them was summarized at the following site: http://www.rjamorim.com/test/32kbps/results.html
Most of them are problematic at very low rates, not least because they would require your users to download new software to listen. If you assume they have iTunes, the AAC seems like a good bet.
The program dbpoweramp can make it easier to convert audio formats than some others. It can be used with the aforementioned LAME as well as many other codecs.
"Most of them are problematic at very low rates, not least because they would require your users to download new software to listen."
That's what's true of the dss format in which I make the recordings. You have to download the software, and on top of that the browser tries to read the format as an HTML page, so you have to save the file to disk and then listen to it. That's what I mean by being a user-hostile format.
I tried re-encoding one of your MP3 files as 8 kbps mono AAC using iTunes and I got a pretty decent quality at 1/4th the size. You might want to try that.