I just got done exporting some WAV files of music i created.
44.1 kHz, 16 bit
One song is 3:06 and weighs in at a whopping 115 mb. Is this normal, to me it seems too large even for WAV.
How am i supposed to fit over 10 minutes on a CD???
Don’t know exactly what’s gone wrong but no, it isn’t normal.
I was using Soundtrack Pro if that gives anyone better insight.
A standard 700mb CD holds about 80 minutes of music so that size isn’t outrageously large compared to whatever uncompressed audio format you select when you make the CD (it probably won’t use .wav files but they will be converted into similarly large, uncompressed audio files when creating the CD).
For local use and storage considerations you probably want to compress the files into another format, or a compressed .wav format. There are lots of utilities out there to convert .wav files to, for example .mp3 files (a much smaller but lower quality format) or something like FLACwhich is still somewhat smaller than a .wav but considered “lossless” compression.
There’s definitely something odd going on. Normal rule-of-thumb for wave files is 10mb per minute, hence 70 minutes on a 700mb CD. Your three minute wave file should be approx 30mb. That’s at the standard 44.1 kHz, 16 bit resolution. My guess is that your software is saving the file in some other resolution.
Are you sure it’s saving as stereo? I have no experience of 5.1 surround sound or whatever it’s called, but I’d expect the file size would be a lot larger. If it’s not that, go through the save as settings and make sure it’s set to 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo.
Audio CD’s don’t contain .wav files. There is no correlation between the possible size of a wav file and the length of a CD. They use a standard format called Red Book Audio.
As mentioned in an earlier post they are each a similarly large, uncompressed sound file format (so there might be an indirect, coincidental correlation) but the .wav files the OP is concerned about are not what will wind up being written to a CD if they create a standard audio CD. The CD burning software would convert them to another format before writing them to the CD.
The difference you are seeing in the OP’s .wav file size and the file size you expect from a .wav file of similar length is probably due to the various compressed .wav formats that exist and as you mentioned differences in quality or stereo settings.
The OP later mentioned they are using Soundtrack Pro. I’m not 100% sure but it appears from a few quick searches it only supports raw, uncompressed .wav format but can also save as AIFF, MP3 or AAC.
Wrong. Any digital audio file of the correct resolution is the exact same thing as a CD audio track.
Windows calls them wave files, Mac calls them AIFF files, and what happens when they’re put on an audio CD is that the software copies the digital audio information directly and the only other thing that’s written is a little address file that tells the CD player where to find each track.
I’ve worked with music my whole life, I’ve studied audio engineering, and I’ve personally mastered CDs for commercial release. ANY digital audio file of the correct parameters - 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo - can be written directly to an audio CD.
Since you like Wiki, try reading the Wave file article. The important bit is this:
What that means, in plain English, is what I said above. CD audio tracks are the same size as wave files of the correct resolution, because functionally they’re the same thing.
I’d appreciate it if you stopped spreading misinformation on a board that’s meant to provide factual information.
nevermind
Actually the pertinent section of the Wikipedia article you cite is below
After stripping the headers, among other things, the file that ultimately is written to the cd is no longer a .wav file as I said. Thanks for clearing that up.
I’ll dumb it down as far as I can.
A Wave file, or any other kind of audio file, is a kind of container. In fact, most computer files are kinds of container. You have the data, which is raw information, and you have the container which holds the data.
All those containers are is a little tiny scrap of information that says what kind of file it is, so that the computer or other digital device knows what to do with the data it contains.
To write an audio CD, you need a particular kind of data: 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo. If you have a wave file in that resolution, you can make an audio CD track out of it. What happens is that the burner software takes the information out of the wave container and puts it in a CD-audio container.
The important part of that statement is that the burner software takes the information out of the wave container and puts it in a CD-audio container.
Which means that it’s the exact same data. The CD burner software does not change the data, it does not convert the data, all it does is copy the data from one kind of container (Wave file) to another (CD audio file).
(If your audio file is in some other format and/or resolution, some burner software will convert it into 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo and then burn it to an audio CD. On a Windows computer, that means it will convert the file into a wave file at the correct resolution.)
That’s the reason why blank CDs will often say on the packaging “800mb data/80 minutes audio” or something similar. Because we know how much data a minute of audio at 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo takes up. It takes up around 10mb, which is what I started out saying. Whether it’s a wave file, CD audio file, or some other format. The actual data is the same, whatever the container happens to be.
Ergo my statement that it is a “similarly large, uncompressed audio format” that is no longer a .wav file. And that a .wav file of the right bitrate may very well coincide with the “right amount” of time on an audio CD (or it may not, depending on the compression settings in the .wav) Thanks for dumbing it down, and clearing it up once again.
typically a CD-ROM can hold less data than an audio CD due to the additional error-correction code. Thus why it’s 80 min. of audio, but only 700 MB of data.