Reducing audio file sizes

I'm using imported audio files in my captivate. They were
encoded at 128 and are mp3. When I import them I think captivate
converts to WAV? I don't know why that would happen. But when I
change the audio encoding settings from the default of 64kbps to
32kbps and then publish, the first thing that happens is that it
shows that it is converting each WAV to MP3 (even though I imported
the files as mp3). Also, it sounds awful encoded at 32. I tried it
at 48 and it still doesn't sound that great.
Is there a better way to reduce file size with audio files? I
thought about going to the source files and re-encoding in audacity
and then importing. Would that help? If I did that, what would I
set the encoding rate to?
Thanks,

Your observations are dead-on. The Adobe Captivate
methodology is to have a high resolution sound container (WAV) and
then let the user compile to other sound quality levels. You are
correct that your MP3 is being converted to WAV.
There have been several posts here about sound quality in CP4
and I am in complete agreement with them about the poor quality of
sound. It appears that the sound driver is choppy in CP4.
Some of the users and active Forum members have done sound
experiments with regard to size. It appears that higher encoding
rates have a minor effect on file size. Go ahead and crank up the
sound quality and monitor your file size. With a small increment in
file size, you can improve the sound quality. My experiments for
getting "good" sound quality have produced only "fair" results and
I find the sound quality to less than what I want in almost all
conditions.
Please voice your complain to the Adobe Tech Support people.
They need to hear this over and over again to get this flaw
repaired.
My second pet-peeve about sound is a lack of a user defined
sound level (gain) in the form of a slider pre-amp. The automatic
setting seems to over-boost the sound levels and that introduces
white noise at low sound levels (soft passages or longer pauses).
If you find the same thing, please add that to your complaint when
you contact technical support.
The sound issue needs to be put to Adobe for proper repair
and I'm not alone in trying to "turn up the volume" on this issue.
Joe C.

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A simple and free way of reducing PDF file size using Preview

Note: this is a copy and update of a 5 year old discussion in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard discussions which you can find here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/6109398#6109398
This is a simple and free solution I found to reduce the file size of PDFs in OS X, without the high cost and awful UI of Acrobat Pro, and with acceptable quality. I still use it every day, although I have Acrobat Pro as part of Adove Creative Cloud subscription.
Since quite a few people have found it useful and keep asking questions about the download location and destination of the filters, which have changed since 2007, I decided to write this update, and put it in this more current forum.
Here is how to install it:
Download the filters here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41548940/PDF%20compression%20filters%20%28Un zip%20and%20put%20in%20your%20Library%20folder%29.zip
Unzip the downloaded file and copy the filters in the appropriate location (see below).
Here is the appropriate location for the filters:
This assumes that your startup disk's name is "Macintosh HD". If it is different, just replace "Macintosh HD" with the name of your startup disk.
If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.7.x or 10.8.x) then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services". This folder should already exist and contain files. Once you put the downloaded filters there, you should have for example one file with the following path:
"Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"
If you are running an earlier vesion of OS X (10.6.x or earlier), then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/Filters" and you should have for example one file with the following path:
"Macintosh HD/Library/Filters/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"
Here is how to use it:
Open a PDF file using Apple's Preview app,
Choose Export (or Save As if you have on older version of Mac OS X) in the File menu,
Choose PDF as a format
In the "Quartz Filter" drop-down menu, choose a filter "Reduce to xxx dpi yyy quality"; "Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION" is a good trade-off between quality and file size
Here is how it works:
These are Quartz filters made with Apple Colorsinc Utility.
They do two things:
downsample images contained in a PDF to a target density such as 150 dpi,
enable JPEG compression for those images with a low or medium setting.
Which files does it work with?
It works with most PDF files. However:
It will generally work very well on unoptimized files such as scans made with the OS X scanning utility or PDFs produced via OS X printing dialog.
It will not further compress well-optimized (comrpessed) files and might create bigger files than the originals,
For some files it will create larger files than the originals. This can happen in particular when a PDF file contains other optomizations than image compression. There also seems to be a bug (reported to Apple) where in certain circumstances images in the target PDF are not JPEG compressed.
What to do if it does not work for a file (target PDF is too big or even larger than the original PDF)?
First,a good news: since you used a Save As or Export command, the original PDF is untouched.
You can try another filter for a smaller size at the expense of quality.
The year being 2013, it is now quite easy to send large files through the internet using Dropbox, yousendit.com, wetransfer.com etc. and you can use these services to send your original PDF file.
There are other ways of reducing the size of a PDF file, such as apps in the Mac App store, or online services such as the free and simple http://smallpdf.com
What else?
Feel free to use/distribute/package in any way you like.

Thanks ioscar.
The original link should be back online soon.
I believe this is a Dropbox error about the traffic generated by my Dropbox shared links.
I use Dropbox mainly for my business and I am pretty upset by this situation.
Since the filters themsemves are about 5KB, I doubt they are the cause for this Dropbox misbehavior!
Anyway, I submitted a support ticket to Dropbox, and hope everything will be back to normal very soon.
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I may have used a significant amount of bandwidth but nowhere near the 200GB/day limit of my Dropbox Pro account.
I see 2 possible reasons to Dropbox freaking out:
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- Or Dropbox miscalculates used bandwidth, counting the total size of the file for every download begun, and I started a lot of downloads, and skipped to the end of the video a lot of times on my Apple TV.

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I don't want to just choose between high quality print or smallest file size.
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Can I do this manually? When I use smallest file size the quality is too low and the content looks bad.
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Reducing MP4 File Size for online upload

I have a short HD video almost 1 GB in size (impossible to upload online). Is there an easy way to reduce the file size using IMovie or another program that I don't have to go out and buy?

I don't think you'll have too much success with this. Mpegs are already compressed files, so there's no real benefit to trying for further reduction. In some cases using compression software will make the resulting file larger than the original.
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Reducing MP4 File Size

I have a short HD video almost 1 GB in size (impossible to upload online). Is there an easy way to reduce the file size using IMovie or another program that I don't have to go out and buy?

I don't think you'll have too much success with this. Mpegs are already compressed files, so there's no real benefit to trying for further reduction. In some cases using compression software will make the resulting file larger than the original.
There are utilities that can be used to slice up a file into smaller parts that can then be reassembled. For example, Movie Cutter, SplitFuse, Split&Concat, MacAppStuff Pieces are a few. Look for them at VersionTracker or MacUpdate. Stuffit Deluxe is a commercial product that includes the ability to split and join multiple pieces of a file archive and has the benefit of being available on both Macs and PCs.
You can then split a large file into several smaller files to send via email or to upload to file server sites. Of course the recipient will need a compatible utility to join the pieces.

Reducing PDF File Sizes

We create and use numerous pdf files, some with fill-in fields and some without. Is there a way to reduce the file size without adversely affecting response time to open the file? Some of us are running Acrobat Professional version 7 and others are running version 8. Some of us have Windows XP and some have Windows 2000.
Any help you can give us would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Ken K

>I thought that if a file was compressed in some way that it might take some time to decompress the file.
I see - entirely reasonable to think that. However, almost every PDF
is already compressed using technologies like ZIP or JPEG. When you
reduce the file size you are usually doing some combination of
* reducing image resolution
* using more agressive JPEG compression
* deleting stuff you can live without
So this doesn't affect the load time.
JPEG 2000 compression is stronger and a bit slower, but probably
nothing to worry about, especially if you don't have high resolution.
Aandi Inston

Reducing audio file sizes

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