Compress CD s

[warren sinden]

My Partner bought me an Ipod for my birthday.
I have a few podcasts which I have downloaded to CD.
The podcatwas brtween 50 &60 MB.
The CD is 600Mb.
Is itpossible to make it smaller?

[The_Fire]

Which codec are you using?

[krelnik]

What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to make more podcasts fit on a single CD? Or are you trying to fit more podcasts on your iPod?

I assume when you said the podcast was 50 to 60 MB that you mean the original file, just as downloaded. Usually this is in M4A (Apple iPod) or MP3 (everyone else, and the iPod too) file format. These file formats use something called "lossy compression" to make them small and easy to download.

Compact Discs, at least when they are made in a way to be played by popular music players and in your car, do not use lossy compression. They store the music in an uncompressed form. Thus files that seemingly should fit several to a CD can balloon up when you burn them to a CD, to take up all the space. In fact, a CD normally will only hold 74 minutes to 80 minutes of sound. In comparison, 650 Meg of MP3 files can be many, many hours of sound, depending on how they were made.

Again, we need to know exactly what you are trying to achieve when you say "make it smaller". Are you trying to fit more podcasts per CD? If so, then who is going to be playing these CD's and what equipment are they going to be using? That will determine the precise method.

For example, if you are putting the podcasts on the CD simply as an easy way of transferring them to someone who does not have a high-speed internet connection, you may be able to burn them to the CD as data. In other words, you make a CD-ROM full of MP3 files instead of burning an audio CD. This will work if the person you are giving the podcasts to has a computer to play them on, or a very recently made CD music player at home or in their car that understands MP3 files. This would also be appropriate if you are simply backing up the podcasts for archival purposes or to free up space on your computer.

If on the other hand you are trying to give the podcasts to someone who is going to play them on an old CD music player, there may be no solution for what you want to do.

I hope that helps.

[warren sinden]

I have got an Apple Nano Ipod.
I use my Ipod to play music through my car radio.
my car radio (kenwood KDC-MP436U) can play: AAC - LC (m4a)'MP#, WMA & WAV files.
AT the moment I'm downloading all my music in WAV files into itunes.

My desktop (Mecer 40gig premiun, 256 ram) which is 5 years old packed up last year.
I took it in for repairs & they told me that it was my power supply & mother board that had blown.They replaced it & gave me a 3 month warranty which cost R2500-00.
A few months ago I had the same problem so I went out & bought a new 500watt power supply which only cost me R500-00, problem solved. (sometimes you have got to learn the hard way not to trust a salesman with a bible on his desk)
My wife used to download her podcasts then copy them onto CD to save space on the computer.
Yesterday I went and bought 2 x1gig DDRAM which has solved my speed problem.
I still want to go back to the computer store, tell them that my computer is very slow and see what they suggest.

[theMark]

Hi,

I've been using iTunes since version 1 (when I spent the better part of three weeks' evenings watching the computer crunch my CD library into MP3's and swapping discs every ten minutes ;) ) and I'm using an iPod since 2004 (or '05? - been a while...)

Unless you're absolutely going for "archival value", reading your CD's into iTunes (or any other music library software) as uncompressed WAV's is just a waste of space. If you're primarily listening to it in your car - don't bother. Ambient noise will keep you from hearing any real difference between uncompressed and compressed files. I'd recommend going with MP3 (instead of AAC) simply because it's the most widely supported format, and while it's not quite as efficient as AAC, the ability to play it on nearly everything with a CPU in it more than makes up for that. Also, contrary to WAV, the MP3's have their additional information/tags inside the file. Uncompressed WAV's rely on iTunes' database to keep the author/singer/album etc. information.

Personally, I'm using these settings for the import (to be found under iTunes, Preferences, Advanced, Importing):
- Import using MP3 encoder
- Higher Quality (192 kbps)
- Automatically retrieve CD track names from internet
- Create file names with track number
- Use error correction when reading AudioCDs

The initial import of my library, I used 160 kbps (hey, at that time, 40 GB disks were all the rage!). Later, I switched to 192 kbps. Not really sure if I can hear a difference between 160 and 192, but I'm under the impression that some heavy metal overdriven guitar parts sound worse with 160 kbps than with 192 kbps.

Barring any breakthrough on the human ear by evolution, I'll go Bill Gates on that and say, "192 kbps ought to be enough for everybody" ;)

Of course I might be totally out of whack about that because of confirmation bias etc. etc.