Audacity Forum

Back to the top. Did you mix down the performance to mono? In a spoken word performance that's an easy, very high quality way to save about half of the file sizes.

If you started with an hour show, 83MB/AAC is much too large, but it's very good for a Stereo show. Are there lower quality settings in your program? I'd be looking for a "render as Mono" setting somewhere.

Yes. Confirmed. My hour shows come in about 89MB in Stereo -- very good quality.

Koz

I'd definitely recommend upgrading to Audacity 1.3.10 - there are more Export options and they are easier to get at (they're in the "Options" of the Export screen) which makes optimising your settings very much easier.
To test the settings, select a small portion of the recording and use "Export Selected", then listen to it to check if the quality is acceptable.
Convert to mono is an option in the Tracks menu.

Just be aware that a newly-introduced bug crept in to 1.3.10 whereby Multiple Export exports to the nearest rounded-up 5 seconds - so users have been reporting getting the start of the next song at the end of the current one. This has alrady been fiexed in the nightly builds - but NOT in the release version - and will of course be fixed in 1.3.11

WC