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#110094 03/30/11 07:22 AM
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Dan45 Offline OP
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Okay, I just rendered my first audio file, a backing track for my daughter to sing to in the school talent show. I made a WMA file to play in Windows Media Player in her laptop, but I noticed the file size was like 38 megs.
Not a big deal in this situation, but in the future I'm gonna want to keep individual songs around 1 or 2 megs. Is there a setting in BiaB, or does this have to do with my codec?
I have an older version of SONY SoundForge lying around somewhere that I know will crush anything down but I'd prefer to stay within the bounds of BiaB for now while I learn all the ins and outs.

Thanks!
Dan

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Sounds like you made a WAV file, not a WMA file (or if WMA, then you used lossless encoding). WAV files are approximately 10MB per minute, so a song just under 4 minutes would be 38 MB.

I generally use MP3 files, which run about 1MB/minute at 128kbps; 1.5MB/minute at 192kbps; 2MB/minute at 256kbps; and 2.5MB/minute at 320kbps.

WMA encoding should be comparable, depending upon the settings you select.


John

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A stereo file at CD quality is about 10 megabytes/minute. WMA and MP3 are normally about 1/10 of this (at 128 kbs rate). Either the song you produced is very, very long or it's not WMA and about 3-1/2 minutes.

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Hi Dan,

What I do is to use BIAB to create a WAV file and then use BonkEnc (a freeware program) to convert the file to an mp3. There are a number of free WAV converters around. The reason I use BonkEnc is because it allows me to create variable bitrate mp3s.

Regards,
Noel


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Obviously Dan, you're the typical oldster who knows squat about what every 12 year old knows. What, you're not into file sharing 2000 gazillion songs with 1,000 of your closest teenybopper friends? How do you think they can do that using email or their phones? Compression.

Kids have been using MP3's for oh, I don't know 7-10 years maybe because raw audio files (WAV, CD) are so large. Get with it, man....Just kidding, this stuff makes my eyes glaze over sometimes.

Now you're wondering how you can render a Biab file to MP3. If you install an MP3 codec on your system Biab can access it and render it directly (check the Help file) but most of us use different 3rd party software for that like Audacity, Adobe Audition, many others. Note there's different codecs and some are better than others. Your ears may not be able to tell the difference but others can and then you have to decide on the bitrate to use. The higher the bitrate the better the quality and the larger the file. Google "how to create MP3's", ask more questions here and decide how you want to do it.

Bob


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Dan45 Offline OP
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Thanks for all the replies everyone. Yes, I made a .wav file by accident, but now I noticed BiaB also spit out the .wma file to the same folder and that one is 3.2 megs in size.

I used to know more of this stuff (I used to mess around with Cakewalk, then I hung out with Sonar Producer Edition through several editions--- I just got lost in all the features and rarely ever finished anything I started) So that's why I decided to get with BiaB and I'm glad I did.

I know there's another forum on this board to post links to your BiaB tracks but these were all painstakingly tracked the old-fashioned way except one: Bender's Big Score. That is just me soloing over a BiaB country boogie woogie track that somebody over on the Telecaster Guitar forum shared for people to solo over, so I guess that counts!

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=657772

Regards, Dan


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