Re: Size of MP3 file

On 13 Mar 2006 05:46:10 -0800, "Jack" <jackhat1@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I converted one song from a CD to MP3 to send to someone. It came out 9
mb in size. Isn't that a little big? What size should one song in MP3 ,
in this case Moanin by Art Blakey, be?

First, you're on the wrong train of thought if you're thinking a song
should bo so and so long in mp3. The differences in input encoding
parameters in the mp3 format will yield audio ranging from utterly
horrid to close-to-CD quality. The more you compress, the shittier it
will sound. A 700MB CD can store roughly 80 minutes of CD quality
audio. That's 87.5MB for ten minutes of audio. Now, IIRC, Moanin'
clocks in at just below ten minutes. so you've almost compressed the
track to 1/10 of the size of the audio CD track. That's gonna impact
the sound. Maybe not to the level that you can't enjoy the music
anymore, and probably not even discernable if you playback mp3's on
$10 speakers, but you get a deterioration in audio quality, and it's
gonna be directly proportional to how much you compress.

If you want the best possible sounding mp3s, but still want practical
file sizes, read about and try different encoders 'til you find one
which compresses the way that's easiest on your ears. Listen for sonic
artifacts and lack of dynamics, first and foremost. AFAIK, LAME is
regarded as the best, by the mp3 tolerant audiophile (a contradiction
in terms if I ever heard one) crowd.

The .ogg format doesn't rape the sound quality as bad as mp3 does,
while compressing just as much. With the .flac format, you can
compress the file size in a way that's similar to zipping: you
compress the audio while when encoding it to .flac, but the data
that's read from the file, at playback time, gets decompressed. You
get .wav/CD quality audio at somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 the size.

Still, when everything's said and done, the easiest way to get a good
file size/audio quality ratio is to enode a track with lower and lower
quality settings 'til it gets too low, then hitch it up a notch again.
Don't expect the same settings to work as well on every track you
encode, though.
--
_______________________________________________
"I'll take any scrap from any table that bears the name
Bickert. I'd buy an album of him mowing the lawn."
-Gerry

To reach me, swap spammers get bent with softhome
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.