AUDIO COMPRESSION MAGIC
FOR
INFORMATION PRODUCTS
By
Andrew Seltz, The Go-To Guy!
www.GoToGuyEnterprises.com
Brought To You By
JayKay Bak
www.UnselfishMarketer.com/showme
Disclaimer and Copyright
Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
By, Andrew Seltz, The Go-To Guy!
Copyright 2008, Andrew Seltz
All Rights Reserved
No Portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, audio recordings, facsimiles,
photocopying, or information storage and retrieval systems without explicit written permission
from the author or publisher.
Published By:
Andrew Seltz – Go-To Guy! Enterprises
14 Bogardus Place
New York, NY 10040
help.gotoguyenterprises.com
Legal Disclaimer:
This report is not intended to be a source of legal, business, accounting, or financial advice. It is
based on the personal experiences and observations of the author. Readers are encouraged to
seek out the services of competent professionals for such advice.
The author and publisher have made every effort to supply accurate and thorough
information in the creation of this report. But, they offer no warranty and accept no
responsibility for any loss or damages of any kind that may be incurred by the reader as a result
of actions arising from the use of information found in this report.
The author and publisher reserve the right to make any changes they deem necessary to future
versions of the publication to ensure its accuracy.
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If you do not accept the terms of this agreement, please return the product immediately for a full
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Table of Contents
Disclaimer and Copyright ........................................................................................2
Published By: .............................................................................................................................2
Legal Disclaimer: ......................................................................................................................2
The Problem With Audio Products ..........................................................................4
Why I Wrote This Report .........................................................................................5
The Software You Need To Follow Along – It's Free! .............................................6
A Little Compression Theory ...................................................................................7
48kHz 16 bit Stereo ..................................................................................................7
My Compression Process for the ListFX Files ........................................................8
Step One – Examine The File ..................................................................................8
Step Two – Converting Stereo To Mono ................................................................10
Cleaning Up The Audio Files ..................................................................................................13
Step Three – Normalize The Audio Levels ............................................................13
Step Four – Filter Out The Noise Using Equalization ...........................................16
Optional Cleanup .....................................................................................................................19
Step Five – Reduce The Bit Depth And Sample Rate ............................................19
Step Six – Save To MP3 Format ............................................................................21
Step Seven – Listen To The Compressed File ........................................................24
Conclusion .............................................................................................................24
Here are the steps again: ..........................................................................................................25
About the Author ....................................................................................................26
Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
The Problem With Audio Products
Customers love audio products. Whether they are recordings of seminars and
teleconferences, one-on-one interviews, or creating audio versions of print
materials, a well produced audio product is a high value item. But they come
with a downside.
Unlike your typical e-book, high-quality audio product can consume
hundreds of megabytes of storage space. Try to deliver this to your end user
and you will quickly find yourself rapidly burning through your bandwidth
delivering the product and end up losing money to excess bandwidth charges
or having to price your product higher to cover the additional costs (or lose
customers.)
The solution to this problem is to compress your audio files until they are
small enough to deliver cost effectively. However, if you don't know what
you are doing when compressing an audio file, you can end up with aweful
results that make you appear like an amateur.
This report will lead you through the steps of preparing and compression
audio files and show you how to create top quality results that are small
enough to deliver cost effectively.
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Why I Wrote This Report
Dennis Becker purchased the resale rights to an excellent product called
“ListFX” to give to the members of his Earn $1K A Day Forum (I'm an
active member there) and it came with a collection of audio recordings. I
love listening to audio courses and went to the download section of the site
as soon as I saw the listing. But, all I found were the transcripts of the
recordings -no audio files. When I sent a message to Dennis asking when I
could get the audios he said he was trying to decide how best to distribute
them because the files were over 450 megabytes and, if several of the
members started downloading them at the same time, the performance of his
server would suffer.
Beyond that, he had purchased master resale rights to allow us members to
resell the collection but determined that most people would have a hard time
selling them for enough money to cover the costs of delivering the files.
I asked if I could take a try at re-compressing the files to bring them down to
a more manageable size.
My results:
450 Megabytes reduced to 80 megabytes and the audio still sounds
excellent!
This report details the process I used to achieve those results.
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
The Software You Need To Follow Along – It's Free!
The software involved is a very capable audio editing package called
Audacity which is available for free download at
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Make sure you have downloaded Audacity
1.3.3 Beta. Several of the essential functions I used are only available in the
new Beta version.
You will also need to download the latest MP3 Encoder at
http://www.gaclrecords.org.uk/lame_enc.dll and save it in the plugins folder
in your Audacity installation. The first time you try to make an MP3,
Audacity will ask you where this file is located.
If you have any questions about installing this software, there are excellent
instructions on the Audacity website.
The specific tools I use in this process are common in most professional
audio editing software. So, if you are using a different audio package like
Adobe Soundbooth or Sony Sound Forge Studio, you should be able to
adapt the instructions without much difficulty.
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
A Little Compression Theory
The core concept behind audio compression is to throw away stuff that no
one will notice and then squeeze the daylights out of whatever is left. The
sound file you have after going through the compression process is not the
same as the one you started with. All of the unnecessary information has
been thrown out. So, always keep a copy of your original.
There is more going on inside the software, but that is enough information to
help you make some wise choices during the compression process I'm about
to explain.
48kHz 16 bit Stereo
The heading above may look like Greek to you, but it describes the key
information you need to know about any audio file. When dealing with
audio files you are likely to run across settings that look like this:
48kHz 16 bit Stereo
I will give you specific settings to copy in the examples, but it is important
to know what those numbers mean.
The 48kHz number refers to the sample rate for the file. This is the number
of times per second that the computer checks (or samples) the sound signal and
records the information. This is measured in kilohertz (kHz).
Professional recording equipment often records at 48kHz (48,000 samples
per second) and CD Audio is recorded at 44khz (44,000 samples per
second.)
The 16 bit number refers to how much detail is captured and stored during
every sample that the computer makes. Most professional equipment,
including CD Audio, records 16 bits of information for every sample taken.
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The final item, Stereo, is probably obvious. This indicates whether the audio
has a left and right channel (stereo) or just one channel (mono.)
More samples per second and more bit depth equals a more accurate
recording. Stereo is beneficial if you have 2 separate input sources, but a
waste of bits if you don't. In reality, most people don't have the ability to
detect the difference in sound quality above 44kHz 16 bit. And, lucky for
us, sound quality settings for a recording of speech can be reduced
drastically before anyone will notice (the phone company compresses phone
calls like crazy and nobody complains - mostly!)
If you are making your own recordings, record and save the master files at either
48kHz or 44kHz and 16 bits. If you have two separate inputs record stereo. If
you have one, mono is fine. By recording and preserving at the highest quality
available, you will have the most flexibility in the future if you need to edit or
modify your sound files.
At 48kHz 16 bit Stereo a sound file uses 188 Kilobytes for every second of
sound recorded. That works out to 11 megabytes per minute which is
obviously too large to deliver to customers online. So, you need to compress
the audio as much as possible before sending it to your customers.
My Compression Process for the ListFX Files
When I first received the ListFX files from Dennis Becker, the total size of
the collection was 450 megabytes with individual file sizes ranging from 35
megabytes to 68 megabytes. They were recorded in MP3 format which
does provide some compression, but much more was needed.
Step One – Examine The File
The first step was to open a file and see what the sample rate and bit depth
were and whether the file was mono or stereo.
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To the left of the audio waveforms in the Audacity project window is a clip
information box that contains the sample rate, bit depth and mono/stereo
information for the sound clip. The clip in the screen shot above is 44kHz 32
bit Stereo file. You will also notice that the waveform window has 2 audio
tracks.
The files were not all exactly the same settings, but most were 44khz 32 bit
Stereo files. This was good news because it meant I had high quality copies
to work with and there was plenty of opportunity to reduce the file sizes
while preserving the sound quality.
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Step Two – Converting Stereo To Mono
A quick look at the audio samples revealed that the left and right channels
for the stereo file were identical. This means that ½ of the information in the
file is redundant. So, the first step was to convert the file from stereo to
mono.
Clicking on the drop-down menu on the clip information window brings up
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
the option to 'Split Stereo Track.' Selecting this turns the stereo clip into two
separate clips. One labeled left and one labeled right.
Click on the X on the lower clip and close it. This leaves one track labeled
left containing the audio from the left track of the original stereo file.
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Going back to the drop-down menu in the clip information box, select
'Mono.' Now the clip is a mono file.
This step immediately reduced the file size by 50% with no change in the
quality of the audio. Nearly every MP3 player in existence, when given a mono
file, plays the sound back in both the left and right channel which
gives the same effect as having the stereo version.
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Cleaning Up The Audio Files
Before making any changes to the sample rate or bit rate, I cleaned up the
audio to remove as much stray noise as possible. When applying heavy
compression to an audio file, stray noises (even ones you don't notice) can
get distorted and turn into hissing or other objectionable sounds. By filtering
out anything that isn't essential to the primary sound on the clip (in this case,
speech) we maximize the clarity of the final audio clip. In many cases this
will allow you to compress the file more heavily while still maintaining
clarity.
It is important to do this filtering before reducing the sample rate and bit rate
because the precision of these tools goes down as the sample rate and bit
depth go down. For this reason, down-conversion and MP3 compression are
the very last steps in the process.
Step Three – Normalize The Audio Levels
My first cleanup job is to check the overall volume of the audio. Many times
a file exhibits 'clipping' where the audio is so loud that it exceeds the
maximum volume (which causes distortion and also makes the clip overly
loud when playing back.) Other times the volume may be a little too low.
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
We begin the process by selecting the entire audio clip using the function in
the edit menu.
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
Next, using a tool called the 'Normalize' tool, I set the maximum volume of
the clip to -.1 dB (decibels.)
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This tool will go through the entire audio file and look for the loudest
sounds. Then it will either reduce or raise the overall volume of the whole
file until the loudest noise is -.1 dB.
When you are working with multiple files which were recorded at different
times by different people (like I was with the ListFX files) this step helps to
keep the volume more consistent from clip to clip.
Step Four – Filter Out The Noise Using Equalization
Next I apply a graphical EQ filter. This filter works just like the EQ settings
on your stereo system. It will allow you to raise or lower the volume of the clip at
different frequency ranges.
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Most of the stray noises in a voice recording are at the very low and very
high frequencies. The sounds that create speech exist mostly in the 1k-2k
frequency ranges. By dropping the volume in the frequencies above and
below this 1k-2k range, we can eliminate the noise and preserve the vocal
clarity.
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The Equalizer tool in Audacity allows you to draw a line that shows the
frequencies were the volume should be raised or lowered. When the line is at
0 dB the volume is unchanged. Below that the volume is lowered and above
that level the volume is raised. We want to drop the volume at both ends of
the frequency range to -18 dB and slowly taper the transitions. The image
above shows the settings I used for the ListFX files.
It is easy to overdo this and end up with a very tinny sound, so I tend to only
silence the highest and lowest frequencies and then gradually fade out the
frequencies in between. Try out settings and listen to their effect. Filter out
as much as possible until the audio starts sounding tinny and then back off a
little.
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Optional Cleanup
Some audio packages have additional tools for restoring 'clipped' files and
repairing other damage, but the steps listed above are sufficient for creating
a high quality recording – particularly if the original recording was clean and
clear and recorded at the proper volume.
Step Five – Reduce The Bit Depth And Sample Rate
The final step is to reduce the sample rate and bit depth of the clip to
22.05khz 16 bit.
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On the drop down menu in the clip information box, select 'Set Sample Rate'
and change it to '16-bit PCM.' It will take a minute or two for Audacity to
re-calculate the bit depth for every sample in the file. It may seem like the
program has frozen (there isn't any sort of progress bar to indicate that the
program is working.) But, when it is done, the screen will refresh and the clip
information box will display '16-bit.'
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Audacity automatically re-samples any clip in a project that does not match
the project's sample rate. So, to change the sample rate of the files we'll be
exporting, all we need to do is change the project sample rate in the lower
left corner of the program window. Now, everything we export from this
project will be saved as 22kHz 16 bit Mono.
Step Six – Save To MP3 Format
Now it is time to compress the file into an MP3 file at a data rate of 24Kbps
(24 kilobits per second) and save to disk.
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
Select Export from the file menu. Choose MP3 as the File Type and click
the Options button in the lower right corner. In the options window select
Constant for the Bit Rate Mode, 24 kBps for the Quality Setting and Stereo
for the Channel Mode and save the audio to a new file.
Step Seven – Listen To The Compressed File
It is important to open up and listen to the final audio file to make sure that
everything still sounds good. Every now and then some stray noise can pop
up during compression and you may need to go back and tweak some of
your settings to isolate it and remove the noise.
Conclusion
You can also play with the file settings and reduce the file size even more –
you just need to gage how much compression noise you are willing to accept
in your finished file. If it's a free giveaway product you might want to
compress a little more and save bandwidth delivering the content. If it's part
of a $97 product, you might want the sound to be a little richer and clearer
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
(and deal with larger files!)
After these steps the final size for the ListFX audios was reduced from 450
megabytes down to 80 megabytes – an 82% reduction in size and the
sound quality is still excellent.
Here are the steps again:
1. Open the file and examine the sample rate, bit depth and stereo settings
2. If stereo and channels are identical, convert to mono
3. Normalize file to -.1dB (decibels)
4. Filter audio using graphic EQ to silence high and low frequencies
5. Reduce sample rate to 22.05khz and bit depth to 16 bit
6. Compress and save to MP3 format at 24Kbps data rate
7. Listen to final audio to verify quality
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Audio Compression Magic for Information Products
About the Author
Andrew Seltz is known online and off as
'The Go-To Guy!' He is an award
winning media producer, information
publisher, and website producer.
Andrew lives in New York City with his
wife and daughter.
His products include:
• Rapid Website Development
• Traffic Exchange Red Pill Report
• Selling Digital Goods Online with
E-Junkie.com
Andrew also sells a number of excellent
Andrew Seltz products from other authors in addition
The Go-To Guy! to his own products. A complete list of
products is available at:
WWW.GOTOGUYENTERPRISES.COM
The IM Products Store
Readers of this ebook are entitled to a
20% discount on any product sold on the
site. Just use the discount code:
GTGSpecial when placing your order.
This is just our way of saying thank you.
To learn more valuable insights into the
world of Internet Marketing at Andrew's
blog:
WWW.IMINSIGHTS.COM
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