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Re: Hi! Some questions about populous the beginning by Mark Knight
[March 01, 2010, 11:38:36 PM]
Re: Hi! Some questions about populous the beginning by blacksheep
[March 01, 2010, 12:12:29 PM]
Re: Hi! Some questions about populous the beginning by Mark Knight
[March 01, 2010, 02:19:54 AM]
Hi! Some questions about populous the beginning by blacksheep
[February 28, 2010, 12:41:48 PM]
Re: Duke Nukem Total Meltdown. New album??? by H_Man
[February 15, 2010, 09:29:26 AM]

[Melancholy Spork]

First of all, hey, how are you doing Mark?

I'm happy to say that I have nearly landed my first job as a professional digital recording artist! I may be working for somebody as a composer. This is very exciting!

To assess my skills and place me in the right position they have required me to write two short pieces for them as well as a couple of odd jobs regarding digital audio.

One of these, however, is proving very difficult and I was looking for some advice. They've asked me to compress an audio file from 1.12MB (.MP3) to <120KB (.OGG). The goal is to loose as little quality as possible.

Using Audacity, I've managed to compress it to as little as 170KB (.OGG) without loosing much of the quality. But that's not enough! I can get it to about 103KB (.OGG) but the quality is TERRIBLE. I was wondering if you knew any techniques that might be helpful?

If not I totally understand. I appreciate your time all the same!

[Mark Knight]

Firstly, congratulations.

Are you doing any audio compression/limiting on the file? A lot of these sorts of compressors do not perform at their best if the audio is compressed heavily, and also don't like peaks at 0db, so best to avoid those if possible. It may be worth talking to them and seeing if they are expecting a loss in quality. Also, are they expecting mono or stereo?

The only other thing you can try is converting your wav file to a lower sampling rate before compressing to the ogg. Cutting it down to 32khz but using a lower compression ratio may give you better results,

m

[Melancholy Spork]

Firstly, congratulations.

Are you doing any audio compression/limiting on the file? A lot of these sorts of compressors do not perform at their best if the audio is compressed heavily, and also don't like peaks at 0db, so best to avoid those if possible. It may be worth talking to them and seeing if they are expecting a loss in quality. Also, are they expecting mono or stereo?

The only other thing you can try is converting your wav file to a lower sampling rate before compressing to the ogg. Cutting it down to 32khz but using a lower compression ratio may give you better results,

m

I'd assume they MUST be expecting some loss of quality- that is a LOT of compression, even for .OGG! And yeah, they said I can convert it to mono. I did that, didn't have a huge effect but it helped.

Good idea, I'll try converting it to a lower sampling rate first. Hopefully that will work... thanks for your help!

[Apollo]

You can also use dbpoweramp music converter (www.dbpoweramp.com) with its ogg vorbis encoders to set wanted parameters, trying lower khz value, mono/stereo or just the generic Kbps value.

I suspect whole test is just to test your knowledge on audio compression as doing that drastic compression is unlikely to be used.

something like 32khz, mono and 60kbps might give decent quality as ogg vorbis does compress lower kbps values much better than mp3 can quality wise. mp3 is far less optimal under 128kbps values.

Point on mono/stereo and khz... You can use them to half the filesize for example mono is only half of a stereo filesize like 22khz is half of 44khz without necessarily only having to bring kbps value too low which hurts quality most.