Audio Bitrate

[mykidsdad]

I'm in the process of converting some audio recordings to MP3 so I can use them on my player, soon to arrive from UXcell. These are voice recordings of seminars only. Does anyone have a good idea what bitrate I should record at? I am truly a new arrival to this portable digital music medium. I know there are trade-offs between quality and size. There may also be limitations of the MP4 circuitry, for all I know. Any and all comments are welcome.

-Scott

[lattesurf]

mykidsdad , you can set the audio bitrate to any that you prefer. Since it is speech only audio, i'll recommend anywhere between 48kbps to 64kbps. However, you can go lower, like 32kbps. But as you've said, it is a trade-off between quality and filesize. You can always encode at 32kbps and test on how it sounds on your computer.

So a typical 48kbps recording, for 10mins would result in a filesize of approx about 3.8MB.

While for music, generally you'll want to encode at least 128kbps or 192kbps.

[mykidsdad]

Thanks. If bitrates that low are good enough, that's all I need to know.

-Scott

[jctoad]

If you encode them as mono instead of stereo, it will cut the file size in half.

[impeeza]

Hello, if you encode mono you not get the size reduced by half, MP3 use something called "Joint Stereo" which means in only one channel the data for two channels are encoded. :P

[jctoad]

impeeza is right. I was thinking of wav files ops: