Guide - How to make the most out of your sp

Question

This guide is designed to tell you
.what you should use for the smallest files with almost floorless results
2.some suggestions of how to get your files smaller without sacrificing much audio quality
if you have a flash player, or a hard disk based player and lots of music you want to get the best quality for the least file size. In my opinion a Lame encoded MP3 is probably your best option and if you just want to make your wav files less than a third of the size at a great quality just use 320kb
ps.
LAME will give you the best quality for the same amount of space.
However if you want to have lots of tracks on a small space and still get good quality here are the settings and FREE software you should use.
Razor Lame - An easy interface for the use of Lame (MP3 Encoder), extract the zip files into a folder
- http://www.dors.de/razorlame/index.php
Lame - get the latest lame bundle and add lame.exe to your razor lame folder this will allow razor lame to encode your wav files to MP3 using the latest and greatest version of lame.
- http://www.rarewares.org/mp3.html
before I tell you the settings and explain why I have chosen them, if you want to save time you can just paste this (-b 64 -m j -h -V -B 320 --resample 44.) into the custom options bit, this will set up my options without you having to fiddle about, under the expert tab (without the brackets) then tick only use custom options.
The settings - in the lame options do this.... choose MODE as Joint Stereo (this will use one channel when both channels are the same, then 2 when there different therefore less space) and set up your output directory (this is where all your mp3 will be sent after they have been encoded) this directory must be manually created by you otherwise razor lame will copy the mp3 to the folder of the original file. Ok this is going to sound silly, but choose your current bit rate as 64kbits (don?t worry this will be your minimum bit rate for a VBR file)
Now click the advanced tab, all you need to do here is set the optimisation to "Quality" this will mean the MP3s take longer to encode but the final result will be better quality for the same space.
Next click on the VBR tab, this stands for variable bit rate and allows the bit rate of the mp3 to change throughout the song giving busier parts a greater bit rate (to keep most of the sounds) and less busy part less bit rate as they do not need as much bit rate and it will save space. Click enable VBR and Choose 320kbps as your maximum bit rate.
Your VBR file can now use bit rates between 80kbps and 320kbps, but now you need to tell razor lame whether it should tend to use higher bit rates, or lots of lower bit rates, you do this with the quality option. I would advise you choose as this will give you great quality and a file only about 4% the size of the original.
Now all you have to do is click the audio processing tab and choose the output sampling frequency as 44. kHz
and encode away.
With these options your original wav files will be compressed to 0.4 of there size as wav files but have the quality of a normal 256kbps mp3 which is 0.8 the size of an original wav file. Which means you can now fit 30%-40% more tracks without loss of quality, or you could fit the same amount of mp3s with noticeably higher quality.
These files are as small as they can be whilst almost sounding perfect but here?s what you should consider if you want to reduce quality and size of file.
- Change the quality in the VBR tab, instead of one try 2-5, the bigger the number the more the compression but the worse the quality of the file.
- Lower the max bit rate for the VBR encoding, go into the VBR tab and select a lower bit rate, i wouldn?t advise going below 224kbit.
- Don?t use stereo, Lots of people don?t seem to care, stereo or mono though 2 speakers, if you use mono, instead of the 2 speakers playing slightly different things they will both play the same, this will save space and increase quality (so you could lower the quality setting a bit more).
At the end of the day there are lost of options for you to mess around with and its up to you to find what?s best for you, hopefully these guidelines are useful (however i would defiantly use lame)Message Edited by -Recoba- on -04-987 05:47 PMMessage Edited by -Recoba- on 03-02-2005 07:48 PM

Answer 1

Bloodangel05 wrote:
Very good guide-They didnt sticky it
Nope, but I've bookmarked it for future reference