The most common file format for digital audio files is .WAV - wave files. Modern digital tape recorders will often generate very large wave files, because they capture audio at very high resolution. If you need to transmit these files via email, and the receiver has a slow link, they need to be compressed.

What tools do I use?

Conventional compression tools such as WinZip will reduce the file size by some 30%, but if you need greater compression than this, there are other tools available. We favour the use of a shareware program called WAV MP3 Converter. It can take a WAV file as an input file and output it again as a WAV file, with the  'resolution' of the resultant file set according to the quality you require.

An evaluation copy of this shareware program can be downloaded from http://www.mp3towav.org/wav-mp3-converter/

The cost for a registered version is a modest $US19.95.

The program

When installed, the program runs in a small window

You nominate the type of output file (in our case WAV), set the destination for the output files (in our case C:\JIM). Then adjust the quality settings for the new WAV files as shown below.

Then finally browse to the folder containing your files and create a list of files that you wish to convert (in the table above there is only one file). To activate the conversion, click File>Select file(s) and the conversion automatically takes place.

Further compression

If you require further compression have installed WinZip on your computer, you can 'right click' and put the group of the (once compressed) files in a Zip folder.

As you can see in the test below, we achieved a compression of some 40 fold at a quality which was more than acceptable.

We were then able to send the files by email to a recipient who was restricted to a modest download capacity.