Thursday, October 26, 2006

Audio tip

You may know this, but all MP3 encoders are not created equal.
The LAME encoder that Audacity (and Sound Studio) uses is not as efficient as the one in iTunes.

Case in point: I was just cutting some audio, and a 19-second WAV file of 1.6 Mb compressed to 300 Kb using the LAME encoder in Sound Studio but only 192 Kb using iTunes. I've had similar results with other files using Audacity.

So while it may be an extra step to fire up iTunes and run the file through it, it's worth it since iTunes is a free downoad for Mac or Windows.

Doug

2 Comments:

At 11/4/06, 8:19 PM, Blogger Stephen Downes said...

Is this for the same bitrate? Did you check the bitrate? Audacity records a fairly high bitrate MP3 - I have had to reduce it in the preferences - which may explain the larger file size.

 
At 11/6/06, 12:37 AM, Blogger Doug said...

Stephen:

Yes, I've made sure the bitrates are the same, as well as any mono/stereo settings. Have tried it with several. The LAME encoder used by Audacity (and newer versions of Sound Studio) seems to produce varyingly bigger files.
D

 

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