I have a ton of professionally produced music in wav format and each song weighs about 75mb. Whats the best way to get the size down? Is there an utility like imageoptim except for sound?
You don't need to do anything to it for use in GS, and in fact you shouldn't unless you really know what you're doing in the audio realm. Otherwise you're just degrading your sound unnecessarily before GS degrades it again.
GS will do a one-step conversion of almost any sound format to the appropriate lossy file type it would like if you just drag the original file into your Sound palette in GS. The kind of file GS then makes depends on whether you classify the audio as 'music' or 'sound (fx)' when you drag it in. I've even tested dragging a 1.76 gig WAV into GS. GS took a couple of minutes to think then it crammed it down into a 76mb m4a.
personally i edit my audio files in Final Cut Pro, exporting them to .wav format with a rate of 16khz and a linear PCM setting of 8 bits. i can't notice the audio quality difference in 95% of my audio clips yet it literally turns a 350kb audio file into maybe 50kb maximum.
in the rare chance the quality does sound worse i up the bits from 8bit to 16bit.
id recommend this route, very fast, very effective, on your computer and device you won't notice the quality difference, yet you will save yourself ALOT of file size on your project.
This statement delivered in isolation is misleading in the context of what I've tried to point out in this topic - that GS WILL compress the file size of your audio for you. You don't have to do it first yourself.
GS obviously does not compress dynamic range, which is what I assume you're talking about, but that was not the original issue, nor is it what is on the mind of the majority of people who don't work with audio professionally, nor on the mind of the others who have posted in this topic.
Relax @bloomer. First off I'm an audio engineer. Second in my video I show through my own testing of publishing a GS file that only contains an audio file, that the file size remains the same which means a published GS file does not compress audio. In order to reduce the size of your audio files you must compress them before you import them into GS. So as far as my testing goes your statement is misleading as GS does not compress audio as you profess it does.
Answers
GS will do a one-step conversion of almost any sound format to the appropriate lossy file type it would like if you just drag the original file into your Sound palette in GS. The kind of file GS then makes depends on whether you classify the audio as 'music' or 'sound (fx)' when you drag it in. I've even tested dragging a 1.76 gig WAV into GS. GS took a couple of minutes to think then it crammed it down into a 76mb m4a.
in the rare chance the quality does sound worse i up the bits from 8bit to 16bit.
id recommend this route, very fast, very effective, on your computer and device you won't notice the quality difference, yet you will save yourself ALOT of file size on your project.
GS obviously does not compress dynamic range, which is what I assume you're talking about, but that was not the original issue, nor is it what is on the mind of the majority of people who don't work with audio professionally, nor on the mind of the others who have posted in this topic.