# Anyone have experience with Audio? How many minutes is 10 MB of audio?



## Lunar_Prodigy (Nov 21, 2010)

I am thinking of uploading regular installments of audio sometime in the next few months when the works are complete. its voice so quality needs to be good and cant distort. though i am not much knowledgeable of file types and quality differences. 

FA limits audit uploads to 10 MB or less so i need an idea of how much time per audio file type, and if someone could recommend the best audit type mid, wav, mp3, mpeg?


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## Lapdog (Nov 21, 2010)

It depends on the bitrate of the audio file. If it is 320kbs, then the audio file will be very large. If the bitrate is 128kbs (CD Quality) then the file will be smaller. The average 3:30 song is about 3.5MB, so I think you can work out that 10 minute 128kbs audio will be about 10MB.
As for the best audio file type, I would normally suggest AAC, but I don't think FA supports it. So, MP3 would be my choice.
Make sure the quality of your microphone is good though, because if you are hearing distorted audio whatever you pick for bit rate, you may need to lower the volume of your mic, or get a better one.


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## Runefox (Nov 21, 2010)

Doing the math, at a constant bitrate of 128kbps, you're looking at exactly 960KB per minute, so yeah, roughly 10 minutes. At lower bitrates, you can get away with even longer; In addition, VBR and ABR will change that figure either up or down, depending on the complexity of the audio and the encoder settings.

For CD audio or uncompressed WAV files at 44kHz/16-bit stereo, just for kicks: The bitrate is 1411kbps (44x16x2=1408+overhead), which is 176KB per second, making a minute of audio 10.3MB.

The formats FA supports are .wav, .mp3, .mpeg and .mid. Not really a huge variety there, unfortunately; LAME-encoded MP3 is your best bet for higher quality unless you'd rather use a single minute of uncompressed WAV. Ogg Vorbis or AAC would provide higher quality audio at lower bitrates, but unfortunately, I doubt we'll see support for that anytime soon.


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## Ricky (Nov 21, 2010)

Mp3 at a standard rate you can think about a meg a minute.  So maybe 10 MB.

Of course that's a very ROUGH estimate.


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## Ikrit (Nov 24, 2010)

Lapdog said:


> If the bitrate is 128kbs (CD Quality) .


 wat


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## Runefox (Nov 24, 2010)

Ikrit said:


> wat


 
Yeah, more like "CD Quality" with an emphasis on the quotes.


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## Commiecomrade (Nov 30, 2010)

Ikrit said:


> wat


 
Or if you don't know, 128 kbps is 128 kilobytes of data for every second of music. This is the standard for CD's.

Yep.


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## Runefox (Nov 30, 2010)

Commiecomrade said:


> Or if you don't know, 128 kbps is 128 kilobytes of data for every second of music. This is the standard for CD's.
> 
> Yep.



Actually no. The standard for CD's is *1411kbps* (in kilo*bits*), which is 176.38 kilo*bytes* of data for every second of music. 128kbps (kilo*bits*) is 16 kilo*bytes* of data for every second of music.

In case you're wondering, CD's use uncompressed PCM (the same as WAV files), at 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo. 44.1 x 16 x 2 = 1411.2. I got the math wrong in my previous post because I missed the .1 after 44. With WAV's and CDDA, however, there _is_ still overhead (WAV's have headers, CD's (data discs included) have redundancy/error correction and in some cases metadata as well). The bitrate describes the actual audio portion of the data.

The actual bitrate isn't the ultimate say in sound quality quality (FLAC is lossless (as in, it doesn't lose any quality), but is smaller than CDDA/WAV and thus has a lower bitrate), but it's _usually_ safe to say that two otherwise identical files of the same type with two different bitrates would put whichever has the higher bitrate at the top of the quality food chain. That said, other things can decrease the quality - For example, I can encode a 32kbps MP3 file and then transcode that into FLAC, and all I'll get is a perfect reproduction of the crappy 32kbps MP3.


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## CerbrusNL (Nov 30, 2010)

FYI:
kbps = Kilobits / second
kBps = kiloBytes / second

Bytes are always written with a capital B.


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## Leafblower29 (Nov 30, 2010)

Runefox said:


> Actually no. The standard for CD's is *1411kbps* (in kilo*bits*), which is 176.38 kilo*bytes* of data for every second of music. 128kbps (kilo*bits*) is 16 kilo*bytes* of data for every second of music.



You forgot to mention how 128kb/s is garbage. :grin:


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## Runefox (Dec 1, 2010)

Leafblower29 said:


> You forgot to mention how 128kb/s is garbage. :grin:


 
It's not bad with AAC, Ogg Vorbis or WMA, but even with LAME-encoded MP3 at the best encoding settings, 128kbps is passable at best yes.

That said, I think AACPlusv2 64kbps is very passable - As much so as 128kbps MP3 in some cases. 96kbps Vorbis and WMA is usually on par, too.


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