why are my songs so big

[notbradsohner]

ok, so here we go

i do all of my editing, and effects, then i go to the mixdown to a single wav file. that all goes smooth, but the files i am coming out with are like 32 ,000. most of these songs i am downloading off kazaa are like 3 or 4 thousand. anyhelp getting my songs to be a smaller size?

 

[notbradsohner]

im talking about kb's by the way!

 

[mrx]

You are mixing to WAV format, with is essentially how songs are "stored" on a commercial music CD. The stuff you are lifting off Kazaa are in MP3 format, which sacrifices a bit of audio quality, in exchange for making the file ten times smaller.

If you look around on the web you can find software that will convert your WAV files to MP3 (they won't play on the MR-8 that way, but they'll save space on you computer and will play in your MP3 player.)

I use the LAME Encoder - it runs from a command (DOS) window, but it's free and works great.

 

[Teej]

I trust that the songs you're 'lifting' using KaZaa aren't copyrighted, yes? I mean, you certainly wouldn't steal what we musicians work so hard to sell!

Of course you wouldn't. I'm just sure of it.

CD quality songs are 16-bit, 44.1k sample rate. The resulting WAV file is quite large (40 meg for a 3 min song isn't unusual). Like MRX explained, MP3 is a compression scheme that makes WAV files smaller by eliminating (what they determine to be) unneccessary or redundate data.

Sounds like crap, frankly, but it's much easier to deal with size-wise.

There's a nice file converter called dBPowerAmp that i'd recommend. You can get it on the AudioMinds site.



tj