Hello, can wav files be attached to emails? I’m using Yahoo. I’ve tried a couple of times and it’s not working so I’m just checking to see if it’s even possible. (The error message says there’s something wrong with my internet connection). Thanks
That may be an oblique way of complaining about the file sizes. Yahoo Mail only allows up to 25MB of anything. You can blow past 25MB pretty quickly in a stereo WAV file. People in audio or video production are stunned how big things can get in a hurry.
Koz
I get about 2 minutes of CD quality stereo for 25MB. That’s approximate.
That’s why people graduate quickly to file sharing services for anything serious.
Koz
Thanks very much for your quick reply!
Create a .zip archive?
That will give you a nice, tidy 25 MB file. ZIP isn’t a compressor (that I know of). It just takes the air out of file and folder structure and puts it back at the end.
Oh, you mean to get around the WAV restriction.
I never had any trouble with that. I think we’re suffering from trying to mail a half-hour show. You can do that in MP3 or other compressed format, but that violates the rule of never doing production in MP3. About the third or fourth MP3 edit and transmission and the show will be trash.
Koz
Cut to the chase -
- how big is the file that you are trying to send?
- Does the WAV file play OK on your computer?
- Do you have other problems sending emails?
And what do you think compression is?
Zip and its derivatives are compression schemes for general computing. The ones like FLAC are optimized for audio, that’s about the only difference. A technique for hiding documents, could be to disguise the doc as audio by compressing it with FLAC. It’ll look like audio, it will even play, but of course it will sound as rubbish…
The advantage is that decompressing zip’s should work on any platform. I can’t imagine a computer not having zip compression. 
ZIP isn’t “lossy” compression". As koz described, it’s a bit like “vacuum packing” for data.
Windows didn’t get the ability to compress to ZIP until XP. As far as I’m aware, Windows 10 still does not support modern file compression methods such as 7-Zip without additional software, and it has only recently got support for FLAC.
The main benefit of FLAC rather than ZIP for audio is that most good audio players are able to decode FLAC files on the fly, whereas ZIP files usually need to be extracted first. There’s a good description of how FLAC works here: https://xiph.org/flac/format.html
Both FLAC and ZIP can usually reduce the size of WAV files to about half of the original size. This may not be enough for sending by email. A typical 3 minute stereo WAV file will be a bit over 30 MB. If converted to FLAC or ZIP it will usually be reduced to around 20 MB (varies depending on the audio and compression settings). That is still too big for some email services.
OGG or MP3 format can reduce the size much more, typically (for our example 30 MB stereo track), to less than 5 MB, though there is some loss of sound quality.
If files are too big to send directly by email, there are many online services available where files may be temporarily uploaded and an email containing a link to the file can be sent by email. The recipient of the email may then download the file. There are some such services listed at the bottom of this post: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/how-to-post-an-audio-sample/29851/1
I never wrote that, Steve.
In fact, it’s why I compared to FLAC and not mp3…
The main benefit of FLAC rather than ZIP for audio is that most good audio players are able to decode FLAC files on the fly, whereas ZIP files usually need to be extracted first. There’s a good description of how FLAC works here: FLAC - Format
And the main disadvantage is that most virus scanners on mailservers have no problem scanning files within zip archives. None that I know is able to scan FLAC for malicious audio…
I know you didn’t. I wrote that to clarify the point for LurrellSang.
I think that we can end this discussion unless LurrellSang requires any further assistance with this.