Looper's Delight Archive Top (Search)
Date Index
Thread Index
Author Index
Looper's Delight Home
Mailing List Info
[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index]

Re: Soundbytes on a Website


> I'm developing a website for a singer/songwriter and want to include
brief (30 second) samples of his songs.
> 
> I used the internal recorder in my PC while playing his CD on it.  When I
recorded an excerpt at "CD quality--mono" the file was 1.6MEG.  Then I
tried recording it at "Radio quality--mono" and the file was 700K.
> 
> The 700K version took about 5 minutes to download from the Internet.
> 
> What should I do to reduce the size of the file and make downloading
faster?

First off I recommend using other than the Sound Recorder or Media Player
to record the pieces.  If your sound card didn't come with a recorder that
lets you control the quality level of the sound file, go get ahold of Cool
Edit, at http://www.syntrillium.com - I use it to record my pieces directly
to hard disk, and it does a great job of clean-up if you need to do that
too.  The major strength is of course that you can specify 44.1KHz, 16-bit
Stereo for the file output.

Secondly, the resultant 5-minute .WAV file will be prohibitively huge
anyway - so go to http://www.realaudio.com and get a copy of the 3.0
encoder for RealAudio, which, amongst others, accepts .WAV files as source
material for encoding into a .RA or .RAM file.  The RA file will be greatly
reduced in size but not in quality...!  For an example of this, go to my
EarthLight Studios at http://www.primenet.com/~sgoodman/Studios and note
the size of the two RealAudio files I've got there for
downloading/listening.  The original WAV files were in the neighborhood of
54MB each!  The encoded RA files are about 600KB.  This is well within the
limitations as far as size and speed of downloading is concerned.  And, if
your ISP supports streaming audio using RealAudio (like mine doesn't!), the
people clicking on the links to your files will hear it playing almost
immediately.

Hope this helps.  Any other questions, let me know!

Stephen.

* Stephen Goodman            It's the Loop Of The Week!  And it's free!
* EarthLight Productions      http://www.primenet.com/~sgoodman/Studios