compressing size of voice memos for email purposes

A simple voice recording can be converted way down to 32 kbps and still sound great. This works out to ~10MB per hour.

Go to iTunes prefs -> Advanced - Importing and set it to 32 kbps mono.
Select the file in iTunes, go to menu Advanced convert selection to AAC (this will be what is selected in iTunes prefs).
Let it convert and the drag the new copy to the desktop. File size should be reduced considerably.

They are in WAV format so most editors will work.
Try Audacity
It's free and works pretty good.
If you are using the Xtrememac Micromemo, the bit rates are 352 kbps & 1411, which will result in huge files.

Hi bnr,
Welcome to the Apple Discussion Forums!

I think you'll want to compress the audio file first before emailing it to anyone.

The choice of which compression program to use usually depends upon the OS you are running. I assume you're running Windows on your Dell.

In that case, try using Zip to compress the file. You should be able to simply drag the icon of the .wav file you want to email onto the icon of the Zip program on your machine and get a compressed file that you can email.

For your recording you might get a compression in the range of 10-25%, that is, your un-compressed file of 678Mb might be compressed down to 542Mb, which still may be way too big to email.

If you have the QuickTime player for your Dell, you might try upgrading QT to QT Pro, then you'll have the ability to export the .wav file as a .aiff file which may be smaller.

Info on upgrading to QT Pro on Windows can be found here .


Good luck!


Ed

Potentially very helpful, but what compression program would be appropriate for someone using a MacBook Pro OS 10.4.9?

Thanks for any help on this.

And another question: what program can I use to edit a voice memo?

This sounds good in principle, resetting the advance settings on iTunes. Sadly, even though it shows the file converting, I can't find any converted, smaller file after the conversion window closes! Where might I look?

To add to ChrisCA's post, if you still can't find the converted track after sorting on date added, you should be able to find it as follows:

1) Open a new Finder window.
2) Drill down to the following path:

/Users/"me"/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Unknown Artist/Unknown Album

where "me" is the User account under which the Voice Memo tracks in question were uploaded.

By default, Voice Memos are uploaded into the "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album" folder of iTunes. All of your Voice Memos are stored there with filenames:

YYYYMMDD HHMMSS.wav

where YYYYMMDD is the date of the voice memo and HHMMSS is the time the voice memo began. Your converted file will have a postfix of .aac instead of .wav.

You should then be able to right-click the track and duplicate it and then drag it to the Desktop (for example), compress it and then email it.

As for the compression code to use, if you're emailing the file to someone on another Mac, you can use Stuffit. If the target machine is a Windows platform, you can also use zip , which is available on your OSX machine via the command line.


Ed

It should be in the exact same place as the original.
In iTunes, right click on the column headers and tick Date Added.
Sort on this.