Here's something which surprised and pleased me very much today. I
sincerely dislike overprocessed MP3 files, and, perhaps because I'm a
musician have a genuine aversion to files which have been dramatically
time-compressed. Today, though, I needed to cram as many Audible.com books
as possible onto a one-gigabyte card. I can generally expect to transfer
about a dozen before the card becomes full. Well, I time-compressed
eighteen files using a setting of 1.1 (the lowest available setting) and
pause-compressed them at a rate of 65% (a moderately high amount.) Those
eighteen files actually fit into a space which normally holds around a
dozen. They don't sound too processed, and the pause compression was so
judiciously done that I hardly notice it. If you've never before
experimented with altering the absolute size of files, especially based on
immediate need, work with those compression tools and you can achieve an
overall effect which might make you very happy, while reducing the size of
those audio files quite markedly.
