How do I get my masters to a manageable size?

P

Pillarofdusk

New member
The end product, my album, is 96khz 24 bit wav files that amount from 54 mins to 1gb. Even if I FLAC them, they still end up being 600mb, which isn't the best size to share with people (FLAC albums are supposed to be 200-300mb).

So, what exactly am I doing wrong here?
 
A conventional audio CD uses 44.1khz 16 bit files. That's what you should aim to produce as your final product if you are going to distribute them via audio CD. These files work out to be about 9mb a minute. For example, a four minute song will be about 4 x 9 = 36mb.

Even these files are (in my view) too big to be sending around the web. If you want to share with friends, maybe you can convert the WAV files to the much smaller MP3s.
 
You can vary the file size in your FLAC converter - I think 8 is the max reduction but am not sure.
Consider that a CD holds approx 800meg and most albums don't take up the whole thing.
If you create an AUDIO CD the files will be reduced to 16/44.1 and that will be significantly smaller than the 600mb you now have.
IF you create FLAC files from the 16 bit .wav files these will be quite a bit smaller as well.
24 bit FLAC is usually only shared via torrent as it takes some time to transfer such big files and MOST digital players don't support FLAC let alone FLAC 24.
What are you doing wrong?
Not considering the end user and their gear.
Convert to .wav 16, (which is what a mastering engineer will generally give you), convert that to FLAC and 320MP3 and you'll be able to offer CDs, high quality FLAC and so so quality MP3s.
 
Yeah, like others said, you're going to want to first off make your master files 16 bit and 44.1kHz wavs, and then if you want to send them out to friends, .mp3 files would work. Usually I aim for 256kbps when I'm converting to .mp3, because it keeps the quality reasonable and the files are appx 20% of the size, so most files end up less than 10MB.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top