Category: Geeks r Us
I purchassed some music this morning from a site called amiestreet.com, and had a lot of trouble downloading the files. Well, as it turns out, the album that I downloaded, which was only supposed to be 66 mb, i think, was 107 mb! Why is this? The, what are supposed to be mp3 files, are about 5 or 7 mb each! So when it is compressed, it comes out to that much. None of my cd's are usually that big! Apparently it comes with some type of album art so you can add it to itunes or something like that, but is that why they're so big? Is there any way to make them smaller without changing the format? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Also, I forgot to mention, the cd only has 17 tracks, and they are rather short, so I cant imagine the length of the files would have anything to do with it. Again, any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated, as 107 mb would be too much to even fit on one cd!
What format are they in. Are they .mp3 files, or perhaps .flac files? I assume you have file extentions turned on, so you should be able to determine this.
if they are .mp3, they could be at 320 kbps, which is a very high quality. If you were going to put this on a regular audio cd however, it would fit prperly since the files would all be converted to audio cd format.b
Like Andrew said, they're probably recorded at something like 320 KBPS. The higher the bitrate, the larger the file will be. But if you burn it onto a CD, you'll probably notice that the quality will be better.
Cumbiambera, if your only concern about these files is the size in relation to burning to CD, then stop worrying, I'm not sure how you've gotten the idea that 107 Meg is too big for a CD but it isn't at all, not even close in fact as a compact disk can hold in the region of 700 Meg. So if you were going to burn an MP3 disk with these files then your only concern need be what else you're going to put on the disk as you're currently not coming close to filling it's capacity.
If on the other hand you're planning on burning an audio CD then again you needn't worry because the size of the MP3 files is irrelevant in that instance. As the disk is being burned those files will be converted into .CDA format, (Compact Disk Audio) and then your concern with regard to how much will fit onto a disk is not file size, but length of track. Some disks hold a few minutes more but if you're not sure what the capacity of the disks you're using are, then work on 74 minutes of actual audio. As you said 17 pretty short tracks, I'd imagine that you'd fit fairly comfortably.
Hope that helps.
Dan.
Thanks for the help, and as it turns out, the files were ripped at 256 kbps, and so I used goldwave to lower the bitrate, and they still sound good. I lowered them to 192 kbps. And my main concern at the time was neither of those, but was the size of the file in general, before extraction. But anyway, thanks for the help:) problem solved!
First of all, if they are in WMA convert them immediately to Ogg or mp3, the sizes will reduce almost in half or at least by a quarter. And god forbid they are in Wav, you are screwed, however from the sizes they dont' appear to be...no one ever said uncompressed pcm was small. But 5 or 7 mb seems about normal. The archive you downloaded might've been 66 megs but after unzipping or whatever the sizes probably became the real size.