On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:37:49 PDT Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

I have several wav files I want to reduce to mp3 so they will take up less space.

Download and compile lame from: http://lame.sourceforge.net/ or download a compiled version from packman: http://packman.links2linux.org/

Can this be done in standard SUSE programs?

Yes, and no, SuSE includes the frontend programs that can do that, but not the actual encoder. This is due to legal restrictions. Having said that, if you are only going to play the files on your computer, I suggest you use Ogg Vorbis (included with SuSE). It has superior sound quality and the file size are smaller. Charles -- linux: the choice of a GNU generation (ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on Tshirts in '93)

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 11:37:49 PDT Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

I have several wav files I want to reduce to mp3 so they will take up less space.

There are alot of good programs to do this. FLAC was mentioned, and it will reduce the wav by about 50% and it is lossless. The .flac file can be played back with "flac -d somefile.flac -c | aplay" mp3 is good it reduces by 10 to 1, but as you know there are legal restrictions, and all that BS. ogg is free and is as good as mp3. For the same sound quality as mp3, you would be better of with ogg, because there is no restrictions. The one I want to point out to everyone, is speex. Speex is an ogg-compatible format which has been optimized for voice. But I have been using it on big music waves and am surprised with the sound, and the compression is 30 to 1. That means a 90 meg wav can be knocked down to 3 meg, and is good enough for background listening. All can be found on http://freshmeat.net in the searchbox. -- I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.

Flac must be new I dont remember seeing it in the menus for 8.2 or 7.3. Ill check it out. CWSIV On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 22:07:18 -0400 Charles Philip Chan writes:

...

Carl William Spitzer IV wrote: I have several wav files I want to reduce to mp3 so they will take up

less space.

I forgot to add that once converted to mp3 or Ogg Vorbis that is no going back to the originally wav. If you want to preserve the original quality, I recommend FLAC (include with SuSE):

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

Charles

________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 21:24:18 PDT Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

Flac must be new I dont remember seeing it in the menus for 8.2 or 7.3.

FLAC has been around for quite a while, although it has only recently joined the Xiph family. Charles -- "If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system." (By Linus Torvalds)

How? Is this part of the pro version. On the P2 i have 7.3 personal and there is no sign of Timidity having conversion ability. CWSIV On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 01:08:07 -0400 Charles Philip Chan writes:

On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 21:24:40 PDT Carl William Spitzer IV wrote:

...

Actually the conversions are from wav and mid files not on CD which I want to convert to mp3 for use on legacy. I never heard of using lame to convert anything but music cd format? Ill try that on this box.

You can convert midi to wav by using Timidity which is included on the CD. Then you can convert the wav to anything you want. lame, ogg and FLAC can use the wav's as input.

...

Actually my music files ripped into both mp3 and ogg the latter came out about 100k larger on average.

Interest, what switches are you using? I use "--preset standard" for lame and "-q6" for oggenc (they are considered to be roughly the same quality) and my vorbis file size are almost always smaller. I am already using oggencgt3b1 which produce slightly larger files until Garf bring them more inline with the regular -q settings (in terms of bitrate and file size) which will happen in the 1.0.1 maintenance release.

________________________________________________________________ The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!

Forgot to add, if you want really good sounding files, install this GUS patchset: http://www.stardate.bc.ca/eawpatches/html/default.htm Charles -- if (argc > 1 && strcmp(argv[1], "-advice") == 0) { printf("Don't Panic!\n"); exit(42); } (Arnold Robbins in the LJ of February '95, describing RCS)