[thelist] audio files (.wav)

Phil Turmel pturmel-webdev at turmel.org
Thu Jul 8 16:30:53 CDT 2010


On 07/08/2010 05:14 PM, Joel D Canfield wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Bob Meetin <bobm at dottedi.biz> wrote:
> 
>> I had some very old 60 minute family cassette tapes converted to audio
>> files.  They were returned in .wav format and they are huge, 300+ MB.  I had
>> planned on placing them on a family website but the size is close to a deal
>> killer.  Are there better options than .wav that are a little more
>> conservative if I were to convert them.  I've downloaded audacity on my
>> Linux box as one possible tool, and of course, anything that is command-line
>> doable works for me.

Command line: you probably want sox.  You can downmix from stereo to mono, resample if you don't need high freqs, and then encode to just about every audio format available.

[snip /]

> other options like FLAC or ogg probably retain more in a smaller file, but I
> haven't gotten creative enough to experment.

FLAC is lossless, and therefore unlikely to compress more than 2:1.  But they decompress to bit-for-bit copies of the original audio, so they are great for archive purposes.

HTH,

Phil


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