hi community.
i have a big trouble with disk space. so i have to reduce space ocupied by my music, around 80 gigs. i have no other possible solution. no more hdd buying, no dvd burning, nothing. just compress more and more. all my mp3s are CBR @ 128kbps, so i did some tests with lame and its frontend razorlame. there is no way to hear a "nice" sound lowering the bitrate below 128 kbps keepin more than 1 chanel, i mean not using stereo, nor joint or forced joint stereo. the only solution appears to be mono @ 64 kbps, saving a lot of disk space, but loosing the channel separation. but its not very important to me since most of the time i hear my music in a way that i can not notice audible channel separation, due to music equipment position, using only one hearphone, etc. what i want to know is what does lame do to reduce stereo files to single channel files. does any sound get lost during the conversion besides the channel separation??
also, do anybody know any other way to acomplish this "hdd space saving" task without loosing most of my loved audio's qualities? it has to be always mp3 output, since thats the only format that my diskman reproduces.
thanks for your time.

You could do all that transcoding but why not just switch formats altogether and start over by re-ripping and encoding.

There's WMA Pro available in Windows Media Player 11 which sounded rather good to me at 64 kbps CBR (although I'm no advocate of WMA). Of course more recommended with be to switch to encoding to Ogg as many people on this very forum claim quality 1.00 sounds good to them, so who knows quality 0.00 at approximately 64 kbps VBR may sound alright for your needs.

Personally if I were you I'd look into codecs that sound good with acceptable quality at low bitrates - whilst still having the ability to have stereo encodings before transcoding to mono and later regretting it.

80GB / 128kbits = 1465 hours and 21 minutes ~ 1100 CD's. (100 in MP3, or 18 4.7GB DVD's)

And your only solution being encoding in a lower bitrate? Not really sure if the space is your problem.


[Edit]
I mean, you say that your portable is a diskman, which obviously means that you have to write the mp3's to CD's. And even if you' were always on your PC, do you really want your HD to be the only place of storage of this music? I can only understand that you're low on budget, which is a respectable situation anyway, but i would really delete the music i like the less than to reduce the quality of them all.

I totally agree. You're much better off just removing some of the tunes that you like the least (but make a list of what you're deleting). When you can save enough green to get a bigger HDD then you can re-rip or acquire those tracks that you removed.

You can buy along the time 1 DVD and after another, you will save ~4,5 GB for DVD, of course they will not play in your discman but at least you don't lose your loved music.

I assume that "no dvd burning" is because you don't have a dvd burner, but surely you at least have a CD burner. You can store about ten CDs of music on a single CDR for less than 25 cents. Surely you could archive some music that you don't listen to very often until you can afford a larger HD?

another option would be to upload your music to a online music service such as one of these:

http://www.mediamaster.com/
http://www.divshare.com/
http://www.mediamax.com/
http://www.mp3tunes.com/

after doing this you may delete it. no need to transcode.