Posted by Mike Archer on 01/15/06 03:35

In article <fM%xf.1627$Di.102@trnddc06>, groleau+news@freeshell.org
says...
> I have over a thousand files (64 CDs) that iTunes says
> total three days wall time. I am guessing about 48 Meg.
>
> Quality is not a major issue, but I'd like to get the best
> quality I can while getting the size under 800 MB.
>
> I have iTunes and LAME. I'm told LAME is the best and
> iTunes is not so good. I already converted once with iTunes,
> taking the smallest size that had tolerable quality.
> It turned out to be smaller than I need, so I thought I'd try
> again to see if better quality is possible without exceeding
> one CD.
>
> LAME options offer a bewildering pile of choices, and I don't
> even know what many of them mean. Suggestions?
>
> If it makes a difference, it's spoken English with occasional
> sound effects and faint background music.
>
> thanks
>
>
Lame's options can be hard to understand, but it give's you more
control, any programmes that give you less complicated options are also
restricting your choice as to how you compress your files.

I'd personally say that in your case it would be a good idea to use Lame
telling it to produce Mono files, with VBR, but setting the maximum
bitrate to something pretty low like 96.

Ultimately it's down to you decide what compromise you are willing to
accept between quality and filesize, Try taking a couple of files and
putting them though Lame with different settings and see what it
produces, and how acceptable the files produced are to you.

Ultimately there's no 'set in stone' thing when it come to encoding MP3s
to be as small as possible, it's all down to what you consider as
acceptable quality. An encoder such as Lame offers you those options, so
all I can say is experiment and find what suites you...

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