I run Audacity 2.1.2 on Win 7…
I record live music at one of the music local venues…I make CD’s for the artists…
Recently someone gave a me live recording done thru an 8 channel interface into Reaper…
He mixed it down to 2 stereo channels…and wants me to burn it to a CD…
I loaded the file up in Audacity and separated the songs out, titled them, etc…
The songs run about 120 -160 Mb in size WAV file…the songs run 3-6 minutes each…
They were recorded at 41k and 32 bit float…
I need to reduce the size of these WAV files to about 40 Mb or so so that I can burn them
to a CD that will play in any CD player…
I tried exporting the music files in Audacity using 16K default sample rate and 16 bit…
It did NOT reduce the size of the files…
Since these CD’s have to play on most any CD player, they must be WAV files, not FLAC or MP3 etc…
Although since most CD players will play MP3, I could probably do 320 Mbs MP3…but I would rather
have WAV files if possible…
I also tried converting one of these large 136 Mb files to FLAC, which gave me a 40Mb file size…then I converted
it back to WAV hoping it would remain small…but the file size went back to 136 Mb…
Any ideas on how I can do this would be appreciated…
How long is the show? You can store about 80 minutes of program material on an audio CD.* Since the audio data must be uncompressed, 44.1khz, 16-bit, stereo, the data capacity of a CD is a hard-limit.
Calculating the size of a WAV file is straightforward as long as you know there are 8 bits in a byte. For example, 16-bit file has 2 bytes per sample and at 44.1kHz there are 44,100 samples per second, and you multiply that by 2 for 2-channel stereo.
For compressed files, kbps is kilo_bits_ per second, so divide by 8 to get kilobytes per second. (That doesn’t include the space for embedded artwork or other metadata.)
Since these CD’s have to play on most any CD player, they must be WAV files,
CDs aren’t exactly WAV files,** but they do use uncompressed PCM, the same underlying format as a “normal” file 44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo WAV.
The original format isn’t that important as long as your CD-burning application can make the conversion to audio CD. The “trick” is to make sure your burning software is configured to “audio CD”. However, you should avoid MP3 or other lossy compression since audio CDs are not compressed and you’d be loosing quality (at least theoretical quality) for no benefit.
P.S.
If this is one-long continuous file (instead of individual song files) you can set the track markers on the CD with a [u]Cue Sheet[/u] (as long as your burning software supports cue sheets).
*The original spec was 70 minutes and if you have a “70-minute” blank CD that’s all you’ll get.
** An audio CD doesn’t contain regular “computer files”, and that’s why it takes special ripping software to read an audio CD.