New here. I do apologize if someone has asked this before. I decided to make a Podcast and everything went well. Very easy to do. Bought a nice mic. Great sound quality. I exported the file as a .WAV and it is 438MB for 43 min worth of audio. I have 4 clips of background music. Each is around 3-5 minutes long. Basically, it plays in the background as I tell a story. The rest of the time its just me speaking. Nothing else. The background music is in stereo.
My question is how can I make the exported file much smaller? Needs to be a .WAV format. I have noticed other podcasts running about the same length of time with quiet I bit more background music and their podcast file is only 38-50MB… Am I missing a step during export? Thank you all in advance who respond.
I moved this from the Windows board as it may be of more interest here.
WAV files are large and lossless - 10 MB a minute for stereo 44100 Hz 16-bit PCM WAV. See Audacity Manual.
If you only want 1 MB per minute you have to accept the audio will be slightly lossy and use other than PCM WAV, like MP3 or M4A. Those formats will be better for streaming on slow connections because of the smaller size.
Why does it need to be WAV? If the software you use for streaming insists on WAV, then you could try putting MP3 in WAV, exporting by using “Custom FFmpeg Export” rather than WAV. You’ll need to install FFmepg from Audacity Manual.
Thank you for your input, Gale. I’m uploading the file to my Libsyn podcast hosting account. For one reason or another I thought they needed it to be a .wav … Obviously, I’m double checking on that now.
