Whereas other people lead normal lives, Carnac sometimes listens to soundtracks of thunderstorms, somehow finding comfort in the spontaneous eruption of 20 milllion-watt lightning bolts. Be that as it may, when Carnac recently copied a CD-based soundtrack (about 25 minutes) to his PC’s HD, the properties tab says this:
Track 02, WAV Audio, Real Player, 302 MB, Bit rate 1411 kbps, Audio sample size 16 bit, Audio sample rate 44 khz, Audio format PCM
Obviously, Carnac is a computer idiot. What did he do wrong?
May a crazed yak soil your virgin daughter’s prized fez.
You didn’t do anything wrong; you ripped a song as a PCM .wav file, (or “CD Quality”), so it’s big. A CD can hold 700mb or so; you ripped abot half of the CD, so ~300 mb makes sense.
Maybe you wanted to compress it into an mp3, which would be much, much smaller (probably 30 megs or so, depending on quality)?
Some years back, I built a PC for my wife du jour, a nice little unit for the day – Pentium 100, 32MB RAM, CD-ROM, 56K modem, and a 1.5GB hard drive, running Win95 SP2. I threw in a cheap Artec flatbed scanner (parallel port, daisy-chained to her printer) and software that allowed “enhancement” of scanned images, i.e. pixel interpolation.
A few weeks later, she called me (I was working out of town) and told me that her PC had simply quit working. She could boot Windows, but that was it – after that, everything just stopped.
The next weekend, I sat down at her keyboard and tried to figure out what was wrong. Within minutes, I found that the hard drive was completely full, which explained the Windows problem – no swap file, no Windows. Digging through the drive, I found what was at the time the largest single file I’d ever seen – a whopping 1.2GB!!!
The file was named “kathy.xxx.” It was a single scanned copy of her 16-year-old daughter’s school photo. The child had nothing of consequence to offer the rest of humanity, God bless her, beyond an intensely annoying capacity for destructive entertainment.
Incidently, your answer was right there: sample size is 16 bits = 2 bytes. There are 44,100 samples per second per channel. For a stereo CD, you have two channels, hence 88,200 samples per second. 88,200 samples * 2 bytes = 176,400 bytes per second. 25 minutes is 1500 seconds. 1500 * 176,400 = 264,600,000. There are actually different definitions for “megabyte”, but if we use 1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes, then 25 minutes of “CD quality” audio takes up about 252 MB. A good rule of thumb is that one minute of stereo 44.1 kHz 16 bit audio takes up about 10 MB.
FYI, a very nice prog to convert music files: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
After it’s installed, you can just right-click the massive uncompressed file in explorer and compress it into an mp3, using the popular LAME encoder.
asterion, assuming I’m not being whooshed, I’m guessing the xxx was just a placeholder for the actual extension. By the size, it was probably some no compression file format.
Well, I suppose it’s time to ask the obvious rookie question: Why doesn’t my nemesis Windoze Media Player offer this compression feature? The leviathan seems to do everything else.
And what’s the difference between Media Player and dcpoweramp, anyway? Aren’t they, um, both music players?
It should. Do you have the latest Windows Media Player? On mine, I just go to the “Rip” tab, and then I can select formats when I select “Rip Music.” My available formats are Windows Media Audio, WMA (variable bit rate), WMA Lossless, and mp3. Choose anything but the lossless compression for best results.
Yeah, it’s kinda hard to tell looking at the post, but I italicized the x’s. They’re just placeholders for whatever format it was, which I don’t recall.
One of the things that shocked me at the time was the knowledge that, given the power and speed of the PC in question, that image file must’ve taken HOURS to process! The kid probably set the thing in motion and went on to more important stuff, like babbling on the telephone or adjusting her makeup…