When it comes to digital music (or audio presentation), sometimes you want the compactness of MP3s, and sometimes you want the quality of a CD. Vidmex makes it easy to have both. You can reduce the size of any audio file or convert audio files while preserving the original quality. The program supports a lot of input audio formats:
etc.
Do you need to change frequency, bitrate or to use high-quality audio codec? Vidmex Wizard helps you to compress audio files step-by-step. The only thing you should do is to choose several options in Vidmex Wizard and press Extract button!
We will show you how to maximally compress two types of audio files: music (including natural sounds) and human speech.
Step 1
Launch Vidmex, open any audio file.
Select the file in Playlist and click "Extract Audio" from the Operation menu.
Step 2
Enter filename, and choose a path where the compressed audio file must be saved.
If you have a music audio file then select MP3 (MPEG Layer-3).
For compression of speech choose WAV output format.
Click Next.
Step 3
FOR MUSIC:
Make sure your have the latest unlimited version of MP3 codec (44 kHz parameter must be available).
MP3 enjoys extremely wide popularity and support, not just by end-users and software but by hardware such as portable media players (MP3 players) DVD and CD players. MP3 is a "lossy" format. However, regardless of that fact, many songs actually benefit from encoding to MP3. What is removed first in the compression process are frequencies determined to be inaudible to human ears and then as the compression increases it encroaches more and more into the realm of that which most of us hear. The whole design of the encoding algorithm is an attempt to rid the file only of non-important audible artifacts or at least to start with those and proceed with more and more reduction as bitrate drops. Over-compression of MP3 files can create audio artifacts. Hiss or background noise can cause distortion at higher compression levels. Low-bit rate MP3 recordings appear to suffer from a compression algorithm that is unable to distinguish musical sounds from hiss and other noise found in original master recordings. If you are compressing your MP3 files and file size is not the primary consideration -- high bitrate will give the best overall results for the widest variety of source material and playback devices.
In order to preserve the original audio quality, choose MPEG Layer-3 codec and leave all parameters unchanged (for example, Stereo - 44 kHz - 128 kbps).
Let's suppose that the size of audio file is 3,5 MB. If you want to minimize size of your music file (about 40%, new size: 2MB), then select Stereo - 22 kHz - 80 kbps.
Also, you can choose Mono - 22 kHz - 40 kbps (reduce file size by 70%). Yes, and you'll get a small (1 MB) song with a reasonable quality !
(In order to reduce file size maximally, try to use even lower quality parameters).
FOR SPEECH:
WAV is a standard file format for storing audio on PCs. WAV file can hold audio compressed with any codec. It is very suitable format for storing human speech using the following codecs: DSP Group TrueSpeech, GSM 6.10 or WM Speech Encoder DMO. The main goal of these codecs is to efficiently minimize file size with better quality than mp3. These codecs can exploit not only the limitations of the human hearing system (as MP3 does) but also the limitations of our speech system.
Choose one of the codecs:
DSP Group TrueSpeech is one of the best codecs to compress pure speech files. First of all, it's available on many operating systems: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me and Windows XP. Secondly, it produces audio files with average quality and very small size. The only audio compression parameter for the DSP Group TrueSpeech codec is: Mono - 8kHz - 8 kbps. You can get 1 hour audio file into 3,6 MB.
GSM is also very good codec. It's a popular format, supported on many Windows platforms (98/ME/2000/XP etc.). If you want to deliver pure speech files to wide audience, then GSM compression is not bad choice. The codec has very optimal parameter: Mono - 11 kHz - 17 kbps -- it gives you about 7,6 MB for a 1 hour audio file with improved quality, it's better than DSP Group TrueSpeech and it's better that MPEG Layer-3 11kHz 16kbps. If you want to achieve a higher quality (with bigger file size), than you can switch to MPEG Layer-3 (MP3) codec.
WM Speech Encoder DMO is a codec invented by Microsoft, and it's available only on Windows XP or Windows 2000 with the newest Windows Media Player (or Windows Media Codecs 9 available at Codecs section). So, this is not so popular codec as GSM and DSP Group TrueSpeech, but it has real advantages. The first advantage is the smallest compression ratio among all described codecs: Mono - 8 kHz - 4 kbps. You can get 1 hour audio file into 1,8 MB. Yes, this is unbelievable! The second advantage is quality: it has better quality than DSP Group TrueSpeech. We highly recommend to record/get audio files with 8kHz sample rate, and to use this codec to create audio content for web sites, audio books, podcasts and speech presentations for Windows XP users. Here's an example -- audio file compressed with WM Speech Encoder DMO (right-click the link and select "save target as" to download): wm_speech.wav
Step 4
Finally, press Extract button and wait several minutes.
All right, audio file is compressed!