[SOLVED] Enormous mp3 file from export

Hi there - I hope someone here can help me figure out what I´m doing wrong.

I have created a “soundtrack” for a puppet-theater play. The soundtrack lasts 52 minutes.
The soundtrack contains: dialog, sound-effects and music. and - as i said lasts 52 minutes. Its created in 1o “sub”-audacity projects each representing a scene - each of theese contains 4-7 tracks of speach, effects and underlying ambience. mostly stereo tracks as i need sounds comming from left or right. All of theese are mixed down to one mix-track. theese are gathered in one top-project that also contains the music between the scenes.

Anyway - 52 minutes of this gives me an aup file-size at 5 Gb…

I have now tried to export this to an mp3 file:
At default “standard” Joint Stereo settings not touching anything it compiles (over 2.5 hrs) a 4.9 Gb big mp3
Lowering quality to “medium” Joint Stereo compiles to 4.8 Gb
changing to constant bitrate - choosing 128 - force to mono compiles to a mp3 at 22Gb!!! What the …

I would expect the file to be like 600Mb or at least not bigger than 1Gb. (I remember ripping music to mp3 128 Kbit/s - a 3 minute song would be around 5Mb) So… What am I doing wrong?

Regards
Per Høyer

Yes, something is strange!

The bitrate is kbps = kilo_bits_ per second. There are 8-bits in a byte so you can divide by 8 to get the file size in kilo_bytes_ per second.

Check your MP3 file with [u]MediaInfoOnline[/u]. It will give you the format, playing time, and overall-average bitrate and that might give some clues.

If it’s really an MP3 you should see:
Audio : MPEG Audio
Format Version : Version 1
Format Profile : Layer 3

That was an exceptionally good advice … Duration stated 393h… a little long for a puppet-theater play… And - damn me if i didnt find 10 secs og content (for some reason) was placed at 393 hours…Thanks so much