MP3 , or MPEG is a software invention that turned the music world on it's ear a few years ago. Musicians all over the world were freaking out - and no wonder. Suddenly, that .wav file that used to be 30-40 megs was now a mere 3-4 megs and sounded just as good. Uh-oh. Overnight, servers like Napster popped up and everybody started to share the music they recorded (first as a .wav file) and compressed to MP3. No more CD buyers. (Support your local musician! Buy a CD today!).
While MP3 is stealing money from musicians, it still is a very useful tool to crunch down those enormous .wav files and send them over the Internet, especially for voice work, because the initial recording is done in mono and there are not so many frequencies that MPEG can disturb. (Yes, MP3 is great.....but not perfect). The end result is a nice, small, superb sounding audio file.
Most audio editors come with the MP3 compression utility, again, a piece of software that compresses your large .wav file to just about whatever size you want.
The trick with MP3 is, the smaller you crunch that file, the worse the sound. As a rule, MP3 encoding should be set to 128 kbps if you want a good, clean sound for your CD-ROM, video, commercial or animation application. Yes, you can go higher - up to 320 kbps - but you'd need the ears of a dog to tell the difference and it only makes the file larger. Important! Make sure any processing, like EQ, Hard Limiting, Compression, Stereo Expansion, etc. is done in the .wav format before you compress it to .mp3....!
If you are compressing audio strictly for use on a website, then you can go as low as 64 kbps, because most of your listeners will be hearing your audio on small computer speakers that won't reveal any degradation. Plus, a MPEG file encoded at 64 kbps is very tiny, perfect for those visitors with a dial-up connection.
Once you've decided on file size and how you want your audio to sound, then comes the next part - getting them from your voice talent to your computer.........hit the next question.
