MP3 compression question

[coysoundnyc]

Can you fit 20min of program into a 5MB mp3?
How?
I have tried posting this in other forum but no answer, please help.
Thank you very much

[Ammitsboel]

Usually 1mb in mp3 refers to 1 minute.
So with 5mb you would have aprox. 5 minutes.

I don't think you kan squeeze 20min. of audio down to 5mb in any format.
What do you need to do this for?
Is it a must that is has to sound like crap?!?

[behtbeht]

I think you might be able to do it - I sometimes have MP3's that are 7 or 8 MB and almost any email system will not take more than 5 MB, so to get them down to 5 or less, I turn them into Waves and then process them through musicmatch - I can choose bit rates between 320 bps all the way down to 2! I think 20 mins might come in somewhere there - but the sound would definitely suffer - I find a noticeable different with any MP3, but 320 is still pretty good - even all the way down to 128 is fine usually - lower than that, degradation becomes more obvious - but even 96 is "kind of passable" - below THAT (and I've tried them all the way down to 8!), it gets pretty bad. The 8 one I tried was absolutely hilarious - that's how bad it was.
If you're trying to email this to someone - there's always batch files - very easy to do.

[Randyman...]

FYI - Yahoo Mail has expanded its storage limits to 100MB, and 10Mb per attachment! AND its FREE! Makes sending MP3's a bit easier IMO.

I also just got a G-Mail acount with 1Gig of storage.

Later

[beachhunt]

Can you fit 20min of program into a 5MB mp3?

As Ammitsboel said, one minute will be ~1MB... in 128kbps stereo more specifically. Since you need to fit 4x as many minutes in the same size mp3, you could reduce the bitrate to 32kbps and get approximately 5MB (I tried one with a 20 min stereo file and got about 4.8MB)... assuming you already knew compressing anything that much would nastify the sound, that's still one solution.

HB

[huub]

wma sounds way better than mp3...