Re: [orca-list] shri~nking mp3s

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

michael weaver <weavermicha googlemail com> wrote:
> is there an accessible way of shrinking mp3 files that is accessible
> with orca?

If you compress audio with MP3, you will lose quality; the lower the bit-rate
of the MP3 file, the worse the quality is. If you take an existing MP3 file,
decode it, then encode it again as a smaller MP3 file, you'll seriously
degrade the quality of the audio.

The right way to do this is to compress first to a lossless format such as
Flac, store your audio in that format, then compress to Ogg Vorbis, MP3 or
whatever you need. If you're trying to convert audio from a CD, then you
should install cdparanoia. There are scripts available which automate this
sort of conversion, such as abcde, which is available as a Debian package and
it's probably in other distributions as well.

Note that conversion of audio from commercially produced CDs raises copyright
issues; it is your responsibility to make sure that whatever you're planning
to do is legal in your country.