[MPlayer-users] Audio file size

[Corey Hickey]

Oygle wrote:
> I have been using mplayer to download a streaming audio (WMA)
> file, then convert it to WAV and then use 'lame' to convert to MP3.
> The only problem is the audio files are too big. Here is the bash
> script.
> 
> ==================
> mplayer -dumpstream
> http://example.com:8888/audiofile.wma - dumpfile audiofile.wma
> mplayer audiofile.wma -ao pcm:file=audiofile.wav
> lame -h audiofile.wav audiofile.mp3
> ======================
> 
> It works just fine, but the final file size is quite large, I must
> have some setting incorrect in either mplayer or lame. I think it has
> to do with the sample rates ? Here are the file sizes.
> 
> audiofile.wma - 3.6 Mb
> audiofile.wav - 102.3 Mb
> audiofile.mp3 - 9.3 Mb
> 
> Any clues please ?

There's probably no problem there -- lame is just defaulting to a higher
bitrate than that of the original wma. If you need to reduce bitrate,
peruse the lame man page and find out how to reduce bitrate or use a
lower-quality vbr mode. I can't tell you exactly because I don't use
lame much.

By the way, re-encoding always hurts quality. You should leave the file
as a wma unless you have a good reason. Converting to a less restricted
format for interoperability is a good reason. Depending on what you're
doing, though, you should consider oggenc instead of lame.

-Corey