Shrink wav file size

Hi All,

I had someone recorded thousands of audio files for an educational software, everything is fine but the file size. Here is an example:
My version: Mono, 44.1K, 32bit, 78KB
M-W.com version: Mono, 44.1K, 32bit, 9.5KB
I have uploaded both files, please check them out.

Bit rate seems to be the only difference to me, the second one even has better quality despite of its significantly smaller size. Is it possible to reduce my version to around 10KB without much quality loss? Thanks for any help!
compare.zip (69 KB)

I found a software which did the job, I’m so lucky.

My next step is joining these small files into several big files, the software will load these big files and locate certain file to play it. Installation will take quite a while if distributing small files directly.

1.wav (9.5 kB) 8 bit 11025 Hz mono - significantly lower quality. Audio bandwidth below 5.5 kHz, 8 but resolution)

2.wav (78 kB) 16 bit 44100 Hz mono - significantly higher quality. Audio bandwidth to about 16 kHz (probably limited by the frequency response of the microphone more than anything else), 16 bit resolution.


1.wav has a peak amplitude of -3.8 dB
2.wav has a peak amplitude of -12.9 dB

1.wav is not better quality than 2.wav, it is much worse quality, but it is a lot louder.

If you amplify the two samples to the same level and listen through reasonable quality headphones, you will here that 1.wav is considerably muffled and 2.wav considerably more clear. This is primarily due to the low sample rate of 1.wav.

If you listen to samples with both loud and quite portions, you will also notice that the low bit depth suffers from a background hiss.

If you normalise the higher quality sample (2.wav) and export as an .ogg file with the quality set to 0 (maximum compression) the resulting file will be even smaller (8.9 kB) than the low quality (1.wav) sample, but the sound quality will be far better.

Wow, thank you so much, Steve. Your post is very helpful, now I got some clues to start from.

I thought the smaller file had higher quality, it sounds more clear on my poor speakers.

lol. That’s the trouble with pc speakers - they’re often so poor that it’s hard to tell the difference between “clear” and “loud”

(add some decent headphones to you list for Santa)

Steve, I should have followed your first reply. After many tests, I realized ogg was the best solution for my project. The quality is excellent, the file size is great. Now all I need to do is to find a function to play a buffer which holds an ogg file.