How to shrink songs and other sounds

[Kaitech[SanD]]

Hello there! I'm sure you're all fed up of the fact that songs take up more than 90% of your map size? I'm guessing your also fed up of reducing them to about 1mb and losing all sense of quality the song possess? Well in this rather easy tutorial I will teach you how to shrink your songs! You may want to do this to get more on a small MP3 player, if you burn songs to disc and want more; then this is the guide for you! THis guide will teach you to lose 4/5 of the song's size, without losing ANY quality AT ALL!

So, let us start this thing!

Ok, so I guess you're all thinking WTF H4X HOW DO THIS LUL U NUB LIAR.
Well, I'll show you I ain't lying, but first you must download this program, and this DLL! Any of those links don't work or you don't trust the sites? Tell me in a PM and I'll pastebin them!

Ok, so I'm assuming you downloaded the installer, and the .DLL file? Good, now run the setup to install Goldwave! That done? Locate the Goldwave folder, and stick the lame_enc.DLL in there!

It should now look like this:
View attachment The Folder.bmp

So, I'm guessing you have the song already? I'm a bit of a lame cheapskate and downloaded mine, DON'T!

View attachment The Song.bmp Also, make sure the Bit Rate is 128 kbps!

So, we have them important stages, let's finally get on with the reducing!

Open Goldwave, them open your song, the same way you open a picture in paint. Now for the actual reduction. This is a pretty easy step, but if performed wrong, you will lose quality!

So, select save as, where the usual Save As... menu approaches.
Select the Drop Down menu where it says ATTRIBUTES and now scroll down a bit, not too much, and select Layer-3, 44100 Hz, 40 kbps, mono.
Now click Save, and overwrite the file you opened. Now you can close Goldwave!


Navigate back to where your song was saved. now highlight it and see the difference, then play it, if you have lost any quality, feel free to stab me in the face...

This is my song size now!
View attachment The Reduced.bmp

So, with an old song size of 2.13mb, or 2155kb(?). I now have reduced that by exactly 1455kb! That's about one third!


I hope I helped all you mapmakers who want music in their maps, or music lovers who want more songs on their MP3 Player or MP3 Phone.

You can also change the format of a file with this program, but there are MANY better converters out there than this I'm afraid...

 

[Kaitech[SanD]]

OK, I attached the image files properly and made sure it's finished. I'll add color and stuff soon.

 

[Kwaliti]

Not bad. You pretty much covered everything. But what if my song's bitrate is higher? Or lower?

 

[Kaitech[SanD]]

If it's higher than 128, then it'll most likely need shrinking even more, 'cause I think that makes it bigger, and if it's lower then I am guessing that it has bad quality.

But every song I have come across is 128kbps

 

[brad.dude03]

I already did this tutorial.

1) I created a tutorial showing users how to compress audio files and then import them into their map for use as music.

2) Another user created another tutorial detailing audio compression techniques.

So, it's an alright tutorial, but as they say, always you search first to make sure your tutorial hasn't already been covered so that you're not wasting your time.

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31249

 

[Kaitech[SanD]]

Argh! Damn that! No fair!

Ahh well... I'll get over it.

 

[Wolverabid]

Argh! Damn that! No fair!

Ahh well... I'll get over it.

kk... people can still read it in the Graveyard anyway!

~ Thread moved.