my friend and i are doing a website for an upcoming band and added 5 of their songs to the site.
only problem is the flash movie with the songs in it (i didnt wanna use streaming audio because of the nasty looking player buttons) is 19mb. is there some way i can cut down on the size any?
key thing is, i cant loose quality in anyway.
any suggestions anyone?
the sites www.iamfullcircle.com if anyone wants to test it out on their computer, please tell me what connection speed you have and how long it took if you do.
The way I have done it up to this point is to take each song, place it in a blank FLA with it’s own preloader, and then use the loadMovie(); method to load each one separately. At least the person can then be listening to one song while he waits for the others to load.
is there anyway i can just compress it more? in or out of flash? another program i can use to make the mp3 smaller than it already is?
i’ve got the flash down to one song instead of the original 6 at 3.9 mb for the movie. but now its not loading the song, you can see the movie, but thats all.
i was thinking, maybe i could cut the songs in half to reduce size, which also make people who like the bit they hear to buy the album =) , and of course, it would cut file size in half.
right now i think the estimated time for download of the music is 2 minutes on dialup. anyone who sees it please reply and tell me how long it took.
Well… you said you didn’t want to lose quality and lower the size, david’s comment about you can’t have your cake and eat it too is about right.
There’s a small but though: What Kbps and Hz were they to start with, and what are they now? It’s true you lose a bit of quality going from 256 (kbps) to 128, but the sounds it’s removing are ranges that the human ear can barely (if at all) detect. So to a certain point you’d be fine in compressing them a bit more. Anything under 128 and it becomes quite noticable and isn’t worth it for your purposes.
Maybe that’ll help depending on what they’re sitting at right now.
Quite right Uther… I hadn’t gone into that because I don’t really understand it enough to talk about those things… but that is true. You can play with it quite a bit, if you understand the premise behind mhz.
To answer your other question, yes, of course you can cut your songs up with the right editor. If the origionals are in WAV format you can use the window’s sound recorder to split them up, but there might be some other products that will also do that. MP3 likewise. I’d look on google for “programs freeware mp3 editor” and see what comes up. More than likely there’s one out there somewhere. I had assumed that you wanted to play the whole song. I have created quite a few players that only play a portion of the song for that exact reason. If someone is sampling something for purchase you don’t want to give them the whole song anyway.
Yeah, basically I’d agree. Try playing around with the sound settings, see if you can cut down the file size that way, but I’d say David was right by suggesting putting each one into a separate .fla. That way the users will only be downloading the songs they want to listen to, saving them time…
so david, are you saying if i have the wma (i do) that i can cut them into pieces and have them go right from one another with no delays between so no one would notice, but they’d load fast and by themselves?
