Tues. 12/07/03 13:23 EDT
.post #198
[url=Help recording lectures to CD-Rs?]
Okay. Assuming these lectures currently reside as files on your computer’s hard drive, tell us what the format of these files is: .wav, or .mp3?
They’re both limits, actually.
If you burn .wav files to your CD-R (i.e. create an “audio” disc), your burning software will likely provide an indication of how many minutes in total the files you want to burn amount to.
If you burn .mp3 files (i.e. create a “data” disc), your burning software will likely provide an indication of how many megabytes in total the files you want to burn amount to.
This suggests to me that the lectures reside on your computer’s hard drive as .mp3 files. mp3 encoding “compresses” .wav files so that, while it sounds very close to the original, the file size is about one-tenth of what it originally was.
Edit:
Wasn’t paying attention. You just told us that the files reside, not on your computer’s hard drive, but on a CD-R. Great. Proceed as follows:
So now, you should determine if your car’s CD player has the ability to also play mp3 files burned to this “data disc.” Pop it into your player (turn the volume down to zero beforehand, just in case), and see what happens.
If “yes,” then “Bob’s your uncle.”
If “no,” then “decode” the .mp3 files back to .wav files, then burn the disc as an “audio” disc.
Decoding .mp3 to .wav is no big deal. It’s just a matter of using something like LAME and running it on your .mp3 files. I can elaborate if you’re interested in learning about this.
Yes, you can use a “codec” such as LAME to “transcode” (transform the .mp3 file from one encoding rate to a different encoding rate), but the sound quality will suffer. For spoken audio, this might be no big deal.
You might still be able to buy 90 minute CD-Rs, and even 99 minute CD-Rs. But if you are burning mp3 files, you’ll be able to squeeze roughly 800 minutes of “audio” onto an 80 minute CD-R, so looking for these larger-capacity discs might not be worth the effort.