MP3 Files

Dan Dowd · Post by **Dan Dowd** » 15 Nov 2000 11:44 am

Does anyone know how to make MP3 File from wave files from Sounf Forge. If I compress them the playback sounds as if it's under water or wobley using a good compression rate. If I use a very low compression rate the sound good but the file size is very large or reduced only slightly from the original file size. I would like to know all the settings to use to make them aprox the same as Napster files (2-3 meg) with the sane quality.

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Everett Cox · Post by **Everett Cox** » 16 Nov 2000 2:09 am

Dan-- You might try BladeEnc. It's free, small, and does an adequate job for me. Get it at: http://bladeenc.mp3.no/

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 16 Nov 2000 6:56 am

I primarily use GoldWave, which uses the bladeenc as a plug in, for both wav processing and to convert to MP3. However, I've never found a way to take a 25Mb wav file and compress it down to a relatively small file and have good fidelity. Thats the main reason I only have short MP3 samples of a couple of songs from my CD (that's for sale) on my web page. http://home.earthlink.net/~jestoner/cd.htm

Dan Dowd · Post by **Dan Dowd** » 16 Nov 2000 7:40 am

I have downloaded the Blade encoder and will give it a try. Is there a difference between a song taken from a regular CD and compresed to a MP3 @ 2-3 MB, VS a wave file from Sound Forge that wont allow a good compression rate and maintain fidelity.

Jim Baron · Post by **Jim Baron** » 16 Nov 2000 6:28 pm

Dan, Give a look at the current issue of Recording magazine. It has an article about streaming music which covers the diff codecs used in MP3 files. Apparently there are some real differences in the codecs and it talks about which ones to lean towards and some to kinda lean away from. Real interesting, figure if I read it twice more, will maybe understand it...))

Graham · Post by **Graham** » 16 Nov 2000 8:37 pm

Best all-round sound editing program I've found is Cooledit2000, and I've tried just about all of them including Goldwave, Soundforge, WaveSE and Musicmatch.
Most MP3 files are encoded at 44100hz, 16 bit stereo, which is CD quality. A tune off a CD, recorded to a .wav and then encoded to this sampling rate will show no discernable difference in sound quality but will show a major difference in size.
As an example- Lloyd Green's You and Me as an MP3 @ 44100hz and a sampling rate of 160 is 3,427 KB in size, the same song recorded as a 44100 hz wav file is 30,169. Both are done in 16-bit stereo.
The acknowledged leader in MP3 Codecs is Fraunhofer, the people who first came up with the Codecs for making MP3's.

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Rich Paton · Post by **Rich Paton** » 17 Nov 2000 9:36 am

I checked out the bladeenc. info, and the main focus of that design seems to be on better audio quality. Since you hqve to give up either quality or decreased file size, you have to choose one or the other depending on your needs. But as of now there doesn't seem to be a "magic bullet" mp3 encoder to give both at the same time. Overall the bladeenc. looks pretty good, though. Can't beat the price!

Jerry Gleason · Post by **Jerry Gleason** » 17 Nov 2000 12:23 pm

Mp3 encoders are not created equal, I found out. I used the freeware BladeEnc for a while, but I had to ecnode stereo files at a bitrate of at least 160k in order to avoid warbling artifacts. Even then, it was far from perfect. It was also excruciatingly slow. I now use SoundJamMP (Mac), and I'm getting excellent quality stereo mp3's at 128k or even 96k. You do get what you pay for.

I'm not sure whether SoundJamMP is available for the PC platform, but another highly regarded encoder for PC's is Audio Catalyst by Xing. Both programs are about $30.

You can hear some of my mp3's at my Jazz Lounge site. Most of these songs were 30 - 40 MB files compressed down to 3 -4 MB each.

<FONT SIZE=1 COLOR="#8e236b"><p align=CENTER>[This message was edited by Jerry Gleason on 17 November 2000 at 12:24 PM.]</p></FONT>

col mcintosh · Post by **col mcintosh** » 18 Nov 2000 5:05 am

Try this one.
This is the best one I've found. http://www.streambox.com/www/index.asp
It's called Streambox Ripper.
It's faultless, everytime!

André Sommer · Post by **André Sommer** » 25 Nov 2000 10:04 pm

Hi all,
Ive done some extensive research on various MP3 encoders and I would like to share my findings with you.

First, if you are using Soundforge ( I personally prefer Wavelab) you will need their MP3 encoder plugin, which is based on the MP3Enc engine.This one is not as fast as the Fraunhofer codec and there's a noticable high frequency cutoff.
One of the best sounding codecs is the freeware, open source Lame codec.(Fraunhofer is good up to 128 kbps constant bitrate).
You can get The Lame codec here: http://www.chat.ru/~dkutsanov/~index.htm

It is DOS command driven but you can get a freeware Windows 32 bit frontend called "RazorLame" here: http://www.dors.de/razorlame/

Another excellent freeware Audio ripper called "Exact Audio Copy" can be downloaded here: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

This amazing program includes a very nice basic Wav. editor, and many other goodies including compressing Wav.'s into MP3 and decompressing vice versa. You can use any codec of your choice but I do recommend LAME.
On the main page of the program click: EAC/Compression Options/External Compression and set "parameter passing scheme" to "Lame MP3 encoder", and set the path to where your Lame.exe is.

For a nice MP3 FAQ you can go here: http://webhome.idirect.com/~nuzhathl/mp3-faq.html

One more tip: if you want to compress Wav.'s lossless, have a look at this interesting ( yet again freeware !) tool: http://www.monkeysaudio.com/

Have fun

André.

Dan Dowd · Post by **Dan Dowd** » 27 Nov 2000 5:54 am

Andre, I tried the mac mp3 pgm and it took my original wave file from sound forge,which was 29.7 MB down to 22.3 MB,using max compression. I want to get them down to 2-3 MB like what can be done with a song on a CD. Perhaps when I use sound forge for recording, I should save them as something besides a MS Wave file. The CD waves must be some other type other than MS Wave.

André Sommer · Post by **André Sommer** » 29 Nov 2000 8:23 am

Hi Dan,

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. I compressed a .wav file ( ripped with EAC from CD, Vince Gill- High Lonesome Sound, 31.81 MB) using Monkey's Audio with the extra high setting. The result is a 18.06 MB (18.496 KB) .APE file, 56.79% of the original. This one is a so called "lossless" compressed file.Your result is a 75% file ?

I also compressed the original .wav into a MP3, using the Lame encoder with a 128 Kbps, constant bitrate, joint stereo setting. The result is a 2.88 MB ( 2.955 KB)MP3 file.

You should save your Sound Forge recordings as a " Wave (Microsoft)(*.wav)" file using "Save As...".

I hope this answer explains it a little better,

André.

Dan Dowd · Post by **Dan Dowd** » 29 Nov 2000 6:47 pm

Andre, I have been using the MS wav format. However I just found out by reading the help file that I can save my recording's from my Yamaha MD8 and Cakewalk sync to Sound Forge 4.5 as an MP3 file. That has taken my previous 50 meg files, which were saved as wav files and they are now 2-3 mb as mp3's. When I want to put them on a CD, Adaptec 4.5 converts these MP3 files to wav files automaticaly. I don't know why I did'nt realize this before. I need to stop watching CNN and the Florida situation. I'm going to read the manual for Sound Forge again and pay attention this time. Thanks for everyone's help and consideration.