Can anyone recommend a format, program, and bitrate for encoding my Total Recorder captured WAV files from a 32kbps mono stream of speech and music? I don't want to lose any of the original quality, but I also want the files to be as small as possible. I'd like to stay at 32kbps (or even lower if I can find a more efficient codec) and I might want to convert to some kind of fake stereo. I don't want to lose any noticeable quality. Is Realmedia encoding (G2 in this case) more efficient than the other codecs at these very low bitrates? Obviously I'm going to test, but some suggestions would be nice. I am thinking about testing both psytel 2.15 and Liquid Audio AAC, as well as WMA and MP3pro. But perhaps I should also be testing Ogg Vorbis. I guess I could consider using Realsystem Producer to encode the files as 32kbps .RA files (as they must have been on the original server). There does seem to be a real media plugin for Winamp but I'd rather not have to rely on this kind of thing over the years. These are supposed to be long term archives.

Well, some people here might kill me for saying that, but I think that the best encoder for such minimal bitrates is the QDesign Music Codec 2

The codec is bundled with Quicktime 4+

More info here:

www.qdesign.com

Regards;

Roberto.

I doubt you can achieve this goal with current codec technology

I would recomend psytel.


BTW: I'm also looking for some software to make fake stereo effects.