OK here's my situation. I had a vinyl record and I have a friend who works in a record store. They have turntables there. I haven't played this record in a decade or more. Anyway he says he can put it on a computer, using Audacity. So he did this and put the file on a DVD (it's over 1gig) big.

I copy the file to my computer and it plays great. I'm surprised how well the recording was. I could't be happier, except

Now I went to try to compress this and it says it's not in the right WAV format. I didn't even know there was more than one format. My friend says the lp was rRecorded using Audacity in 32 Bit 96kHz.

I am not an audiophile so I don't know what that even is. My problem is how to convert this so I can play it on an iPod or at least a portable CD.

I went to CDex and I found an option to compress a WAV but the final result doesn't sound good. It's a female singer and on the compressed version I did with CDex her voice changes and sounds distorted, like you're running a 45 record at too slow a speed. (Not a lot but enough to be noticed)

I have downloaded Wavasaur and Audacity but can't figure if there's a way to do this. I figured I'd ask here first to see, before I spent hours looking at those programs.

Thanks for your help.

You can do this easily using Audacity. I think even higher quality is using SoX. http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Help is here: http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html
But I think one of the SoX pros can give you the command line to convert it.

Convert it to a 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo wav file, and then encode that to mp3 or burn it onto a CD-DA (remember those?).

Keep the original.

Cheers,
David.

Thanks I'll give SoX a try...

48 kHz should be a better choice, no?

48 kHz 16-bit is for CDDA !?

I think the target is the iPod, not a CD (the "at least" suggests that).

IMHO a good start would be to convert the 32/96 files to 24 bits, since the output of most AD converters is 24 bits at best. Recording a 24 bit signal as a 32 bit file might give the false impression of higher accuracy. If the 24/96 file is still too large for your purpose you can try any of the other suggestions posted in this thread.

I actually got SOX to work but Audacity (at least to me) gave the same results much quicker and it was so simple, no command line coding, but thanks for the suggestions. It was fun to mess with.