Compressing an MP3 without sacrificing sound quality

[Mr Initial Man]

How can I do that? I'm going to run out of room in short order on my website.

[opifex]

Are the mp3 files for download or for a player on the page?

[Mr Initial Man]

They're played on the page.

[opifex]

you can put them on a diet by lowering the bit rate...
you can convert them with with most players just by doing a "save as" and select the lowest bit rate you can live with for the quality you need.

[Mr Initial Man]

Hmmm... Which players allow you to do that?

[opifex]

Hmmm... they used to anyway. I have been spoiled by not using Window$ for too long and haven't kept up.
What OS are you using? I'll put up a link to a free converter.

Probably your best solution would be to convert the mp3 to ogg and use an ogg player on the page. An example of savings in storage and bandwidth is 3.8Mb mp3 to 581Kb ogg with no quality loss. A good example of using ogg is Wikipedia... almost all the audio and video is ogg format.
Firefox 3.5 natively supports ogg format and the "normally installed plugins" for other browsers handle it as well.

[Mr Initial Man]

I used M$ Win'Doh's X-P

[opifex]

I searched around (free mp3 bitrate converter) and there don't appear to be any free converters available any more.
SUPER © (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html) is a good all around audio-video converter that is free. I don't remember if you can just adjust bitrate, but I think you can.

Do yourself a favor and at least do a side by side install of Linux... you will have a lot more options.

[Mr Initial Man]

What I could also do is contact the guy who recorded these and see if he can save them as .ogg.

[opifex]

SUPER © will convert mp3 to ogg with no problems. It's a nice program that is really an interface to the some of the same programs used in 'nix (like ffmpeg) and has a really complete codec library. You can't buy a Windows program with the power that SUPER © offers for free.

[Mr Initial Man]

http://www.erightsoft.com/Superdc.html

What link do I click to download this?

EDIT: Never mind, I got it going.

[opifex]

The one that says....

"Start Downloading SUPER © right now and discover this fully featured Multimedia Freeware."

down at the bottom of the page seems to work.

[Mr Initial Man]

Well, I'm trying .ogg, but I'm getting a really broken-up playback. Any way to fix that?

[opifex]

have an example?

[Eye for Video]

ogg is really a great compression algorithm, but because of it's proprietary nature, it requires special players to play the files. Now if everyone in the world already had them as a pluggin in their Web browers, that would be great. But in the mean time, stick to mp3s. By far more popular and much more easy to find a media player to embed (like Flash) where viewers already have the required plugin.
Download this great little audio editing program called Audacity:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
You'll need to also download the LAME library in order to export mp3s, but then you'll have a good little audio editing program!
Once you've done that:
In Audacity 1.2.6 click on ....
Edit (menu)
Preferences
File Formats
MP3 Export Setup - Bitrate - Select a value from 16 to 320 (thousand bits per second)
Lots of bitrate choices to play with. Then export as an mp3, which will play in a lot more browsers then ogg will.
Best of luck to ya!
EfV

[opifex]

ogg is really a great compression algorithm, but because of it's proprietary nature...
The "proprietary nature" of ogg is open standard under a BSD license and is supported by the following "special players" for Window$ without additional codecs or plug-ins...

Firefox 3.5 (native support)
Winamp
Zoom Player
Rea Player
Media Player Classic
Core Media
Jet Audio
MPlayer
Miro
VLC Player

And the codecs / plug-ins are available for Quicktime, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. So, it's not like accessibility should be an issue.

¿¿ Have an online example to listen to??

[Eye for Video]

When's the last time you saw a VLC or Core Media player embedded into a Web page? These are great desktop player, but not very Web browser friendly. YouTube uses Flash for good reason.
Of all the players listed above, can any, or even all added together, equal the browser market penetration of Flash? Nope! Accessibility is not the issue, making viewers download that special Real Player or Quicktime Web browser plugin is the issue.
So why put that stumbling block in front of potential viewers when 95% or more already have the Flash plugin installed in their Web browser?
Stick with mp3s.
EfV

[Mr Initial Man]

http://fba.furtopia.org/ogg.html

[Eye for Video]

A great example of why you don't want to use ogg for Web delivery. My IE7 browser can't play it at all and my FF3 plays it all jerky with skips... and I'm a fairly Web literate guy! Think about all the potential listeners that don't understand downloading special Web browser plugins, etc. Why put them through that?
Best wishes,
EfV

[Mr Initial Man]

My main site uses .mp3, but I'm running into a problem: I have 150 megs of webspace. The podcasts now use 98.12 of them.

[Eye for Video]

Well the core of your problem is your Web hosting company. Unless you are using a free hosting service, there are a lot of Web hosts that will give you unlimited storage (how many mp3 will fit in 500GB?) and unlimited bandwidth. Storage and bandwidth is really cheap now-a-days. Check out:
www.lunarpages.com
for example. Huge storage and bandwidth at a very low price.
But anyway, if you have to reduce the bitrate of your mp3s, I'd still recommend using Audacity. It's also a very good audio editing program.. used by lots of folks to edit their podcasts.
Best wishes,
EfV

[opifex]

Oh ye of little faith....
Your file was an ogg video file with the audio embedded... and will play in a video player. I extracted the audio and put up an example with a player that is the same as the ones used by Wikipedia. The 3m29s audio track came out to be 61.3kb.
FBA Finals oggTest (http://cafezas.com.mx/examples/FBAoggTest.html)
Works on everything I have available... Linux and Windows. If you run into a snag, let me know and we can work on it.

@EfV... please check it also. I respect your opinion and would like your comments.

[Mr Initial Man]

Okay. With Super C, how do I get just the audio?

[Eye for Video]

Are you testing in a Web browser or just in your local environment?
Opening the file in IE7, it would not play, had to download a pluggin in order to play. So that's like.. what percentage of Web browsers? When I said OK, pluggin would not install, could not play.
Opened and played fine in FF.
But that's not anything that Flash couldn't do in both browsers the first time around.
But let's test this in various Web browsers.. When you test the link above what are your results, Mr. I and Opti. Can we get any Safari users to help on this?
I'm open to learning more and better methods, so let's see what happens.
EfV

[Mr Initial Man]

I'm testing in Firefox. But what I could do is ask the guy who recorded it if he could embed it in a flash player, and see if that would work.

[opifex]

@Initial Man... I don't remember, but the instructions cover pretty much everything. There are other tips on the web page. I don't use it anymore.
@EfV... you have to install the flash plug-in also no matter what browser you use. Flash isn't native in any browser.

!00% agreed about wide spead testing! However the basics are tested who knows how many thousand times per day by Wikipedia users (they may have updated the scripts - haven't checked)... but I am sure that this needs to be tuned. Feel free to download the page and toy with it and improve it!

I have a "disadvantage" because I do have the plug-ins installed and always install them at the same time as I install Flash. Works on Safari for Windows... at least on my Window$ test box. Also tested on FF3.2, FF3.5, IE8, IE7, IE6, Opera 9 and Chrome.
Linux tested on FF3.2, FF3.5, Konquerer, Opera 10 and Chromium. Opera 10 hiccuped and loaded the Cortada Java Player first and had volume problems (probably need to fix the javascript or update the player), but changed players from the drop-down and all was fine.

Change can be a good thing.

[Eye for Video]

Well that's my point. 95% of web browsers already have Flash, meaning it would work for 95% of potential viewers (IE, FF, Safari, etc.). FF holds about 45% of the market share.. what about those other viewers?
Still, get yourself a host without those low storage limits.
EfV

[opifex]

Most people do have QuickTime installed... it is compatible. The other option is to re-write the Java Player... or write a new one so that is 100% compatible... Having Java installed is almost a necessity for everyone these days.

Flash is always an option even though I try to keep away from it... a lot of work has been done on this already.
Here is a good reference for ogg implementations for swf that already do work and are being improved...
http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/

[opifex]

stop the presses!
Please check FBA Finals oggTest (http://cafezas.com.mx/examples/FBAoggTest.html) again. An updated version of Cortado was released two weeks ago and I just made the change. Problem in Opera is solved. Need to check how IE will behave if I force it to use the Java Player if the plug-ins aren't already installed though. Will do that when I have time to visit the javascript... it needs updating anyway. Or somebody else can play with it if they get a chance! :)

Even did my good deed for the day by answering the Wikipedia Bug on this problem.

[Mr Initial Man]

Actually, the guy I get the podcasts from also tried saving it in .ogg, and agreed that a good recording could be made with a much smaller file. What I suggested is he try to slap it in a Flash file. All it really needs is a load bar and a "play" button.

[opifex]

Flash will work... at the expense of file-size and bandwidth.
What you decide to use is really up to you at the end of the day.
A good thing did come out of this thread though... the changes in the test file I uploaded should be implemented on Wikipedia later today. So nothing was lost in pursuing the ogg trail.
Enjoy!

[Eye for Video]

I agree that the discussion was a good one. I'm still convinced that Flash is the way to go.. but Audacity will import mp3 and export as .ogg if you want to go that way.
I've gone a bit of podcasting myself and subscribe to a number of RSS feeds. With really good podcasts, including my own, I save the downloaded mp3 file and put it in my mp3 player or my Archos media player and take it with me.... not as easy with a .ogg file.
But anyway, best wishes, to all!
EfV

[irsadh]

it can be achieved by reducing the bit rate.quality will be compromised accordingly the bitrate reduction