Shrink my tunes?
I’ve seen a couple of blog posts recently about this new thing called Shrink My Tunes.
The reality, at least for Podiobooks.com, is that MP3 files are getting larger. Back in the day, many of us were concerned about the size of a file, for both storage and bandwidth reasons. Fast-forward a couple of years and bandwidth is less of an issue than ever (for most), and online storage of media files (for us) isn’t even a remote issue. The result? Higher bit rates for better audio quality. In fact, most of our audio files are about twice as “big” as they were when we started.
The problem? Not everyone has gigabyte upon gigabyte of storage space available to them — either on their main computer or on their portable media device. The application sold for about $40 US called ShrinkMyTunes is squarely aimed at people like that.
I’ve never used the application, as storage isn’t an issue for me. And in the interest of full disclosure, that is an affiliate link up there, so a kickback comes to Podiobooks.com if you click and buy. Regardless of where you buy it from, I’d be curious to hear if it works as advertised for the free audiobooks we have here on our site. I don’t know how it does the compression in such a way to keep the quality up there, but I’m interested.
September 10th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Personally I’d be rather careful about further audio compression. Not that I know anything about this app and therefore can’t comment on how good it is at what it does.
Essentially MP3 is compressed WAV data - which is technically raw digital audio. The Joint Stereo used here, by Podiobooks.com, is a rather neat solution to fitting a 128Kbps stereo audio stream into half the space it should really use. There are some very good sites that explain how it works and it does get a little technical
I’d guess though that this program removes all data for frequencies outside of the ‘normal’ human hearing range. Which can be a huge amount of data, but at the extreme a digital phone call (as a norm) uses 8bit mono - which is why sometimes you can’t quite identify who’s calling.
It’s all down to how much data is removed and from where…
September 10th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
Doesn’t get a great review here http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=1079
“Most of the tracks ShrinkMyTunes has, well, shrunk sound as though they’re being played inside a large tunnel, and background noises (the odd cymbal, for instance) tend to sound less distinct.”
September 10th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Steve,
Yeah, but that same article says that some tunes actually sounded better. Of course, the true test would be someone testing it out on spoken word stuff, like our titles. That’s the kicker.
The good news is that it comes with a 14 day money-back guarantee. Still not enough to get me to try it, but I’m betting someone will.
E.
September 14th, 2007 at 4:05 am
Ihave been changing the bit rate of my podcastd and podiobooks for 2 years and have not noticed a loss of vocal quality. 32 kbps is as low as my player can play. I have not tried “Shrink My Tunes”, but i’m sure that it works about the same as the software that came with my first MP3 player
September 17th, 2007 at 4:51 am
Are you saying you’ve increased the quality of your files since you launched? So if I keep my downloaded files for future re-listening, I might be better resubscribing for a better version? How can I tell whether I have the best files available (other than redownloading everything now)?
September 17th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Phil,
Yes and no. We’ve increased the quality threshold for our authors. Most of the new titles that have been added take advantage of the higher bit and sample rates we now allow. But very few of the older titles have been updated to these higher quality standards.
September 17th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Ah well, It’s not as if I had a problem with the sound quality anyway. Keep up the great work!