Wavosaur

[JNegus]

Love Wavosaur! BUT, having a problem. When saving my file, it becomes a HUGE 113 meg .wav file. How can I save my MP3 file to a smaller .wav file?

[xpander]

You simply can't make you mp3 files smaller when converting them to wav, but exactly the other way around. Mp3 is a compressed format, depending on settings it can be 10-12 times smaller than the same file as a regular 16/44.1 wav.

You could achieve little smaller wav files by choosing lower bit rates and sample frequencies, but that doesn't really make sense in regular use. If you are making files for a CD (?), it wouldn't work. If you are simply after smaller sized files but preserving the quality, there are better formats to use.

If mp3 doesn't satisfy, I would look for example into Ogg Vorbis, WMA or AAC. If on the other hand wanting to save/store wavs but not loose quality, FLAC and Wavpack could work.

Remember that there's not necessarily any point going back and forth either. Once you have converted to a lossy format (like mp3), you will never get the quality of original file back....what's lost in the conversion, is lost forever and no conversion back to original format will magically bring it back. Also, converting mp3 to wav won't make them any better, just bigger.

As a basic rule and when possible, you always want to work/edit/whatever your audio in highest possible (original) format. When done, you might then wanna convert to compressed format for archiving or lossy format for playback.

[JNegus]

Thanks for the input about making .wav files smaller. The original version was in MP3 format but when I edited it in Wavosaur, it defaulted to saving it as a .wav file. How do I change the default to save it in the original format as a MP3? Thanks!

[poivre]

you need to export as mp3, use the export option in the menu

[xpander]

Sometimes I get the odd visions of flies and artillery. Oh well, while the chances of missing are maybe the same, there's bound to be an impact anyways. Thanks for the constructive repair, Poivre.