[Tutorial?] Music compression in Audacity

[Mendez]

Hello folks, Mendez here with a quick little tutorial on compressing music while still retaining (most of) the same amount of quality. To do this tutorial, you will need a piece of music, Audacity, and an actual reason to compress your music to begin with. My reason is that I want to keep AMP the same size. Anyways, for this example I will use Robert Seaton's "megaman returns SoundMan theme", which can be heard in AMP05. Originally, the file size was about 1.4 MB. With this tutorial though, I will show you how to compress it to a little over 550 KB. Let's begin.
Step 1 - Opening the music in Audacity.
This is just a simple step that I'm sure we don't need to cover. Simply select the file, right-click it, and choose to open with Audacity.


Step 2 - Setting it to mono.
This is where you can decide to switch it from two channels to one, effectively compressing the song. To do this, go to Tracks > Stereo Track to Mono.


Step 3 - Exporting it to ogg.
Once we're done with that, there's another tricky step we have to take. Once we begin exporting the track, we might be negligent of the options we have for exporting it.

With this, you can select the quality of the ogg audio you're about to export. If it's pure 8-bit, you can set the quality to 2 and still not notice any difference. Doing this to a song with actual instruments might not work so well, though.

Once you're happy with your settings, just export it and you'll be done.
CONGRATULATIONS. IF YOU'VE DONE THIS TO ALL YOUR TRACKS, YOU WILL NO LONGER FORCE PEOPLE TO DOWNLOAD 10MB MORE OF STUFF THEY WON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT.
Here's a quality test if you're curious:
Robert Seaton - SoundMan Uncompressed

Robert Seaton - SoundMan Compressed

NEW METHOD (11/24/2011):
Skip the "stereo track to mono" step, and just go straight to exporting. This time, however, set the ogg export quality to 1. This will do a much more effective job at compression, while still retaining a good portion of the quality (if it's 8-bit).
Here's some tests if you're interested.The song used was Robert Seaton's "Shark Man", which can be heard in Kengine.
Shark Man UNCOMPRESSED. The size here is 1.32 MB.
Shark Man (Stereo, ogg quality=1). The size here is 551 KB.
Shark Man (Mono, ogg quality=3). The size here is 597 KB.[/quote]

Hope this has been a somewhat helpful tutorial. Have a nice day.

[TERRORsphere]

Can I add this to the Tut. Collection? viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1467

[Mendez]

Sure, go ahead.

[Mendez]

BREAKING NEWS. I'm back to make an amendment to my music compression tutorial. After some interesting tests in Audacity, I came to a conclusion: Ogg export quality is MORE significant than setting the track to mono. What do I mean by this?

By setting the quality to 1, you can retain a large amount of quality while still effectively compressing the song. Now, you don't have to sacrifice your stereo audio!
Here's the test I conducted for you to judge sound quality. The song used was Robert Seaton's "Shark Man", which can be heard in Kengine.
Shark Man UNCOMPRESSED. The size here is 1.32 MB.
Shark Man (Stereo, ogg quality=1). The size here is 551 KB.
Shark Man (Mono, ogg quality=3). The size here is 597 KB.

[BiscuitSlash]

(click to show/hide)

Ummm, help?

[DarkAura]

What version of Audacity are you using?

[Mendez]

It's recommended to upgrade to the latest version of Audacity, seeing as how there might be some features (Such as Ogg quality) that aren't introduced until later on. The newest version is 1.3.14 (Beta), and you can snag the latest version here.

[BiscuitSlash]

Heh, the new updated version looks shiny!

Thanks Mr. BlueBrawl!

[Mrguy891]

Didn't know about the ogg settings, just the ogg saving its self. Thanks