Hi Rod,
>Of course, I
now have to get out the "MP3 for Dummies" to find out why
45 seconds of sound would take up 1.4 MG - maybe because of
256kbps/44 Hz?)<
The higher the bitrate (i.e. 256kbps) the better the sound quality and the
bigger the file. You can get 2 minutes of music into less than 500k with
some encoders by using very small bitrate (the smallest is about 16,
although I remember Heiko mentioning that his encoder would do 8), however
this music will not be stereo and may deteriorate in quality significantly
from the original, however since many people will listen to this music via
the web on their little plastic PC speakers a certain tradeoff between
quality and filesize/download times can be made. Your best bet to encode
tracks from a CD is to use FreeRip or similar software to extract the tracks
you want to WAV files. Then encode the WAV files as mp3s trying different
bitrates, if you don't like the sound quality you can simply delete the mp3
and encode the WAV file again using different settings, however you will
always have your original high quality sound in the WAV file. Hope this
makes sense. There's a degree of trial and error really in getting mp3s that
sound okay but don't take forever to download.
BTW - Roger, glad that info was helpful, am awaiting the chance to download
Killer Rabbits material.
cheers,
Sol.
