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How to Put the Most Music on Your MP3 Player
by Whitney Arana
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Overview
Even as MP3 players gain capacity, they can't keep up with the astounding rate at which music libraries are growing. Despite these limits, it is easy to fit more onto an MP3 player's hard drive than ever before. To maximize the space on your MP3 player, you only need to re-encode your existing MP3 files at a lower bit rate. While this might sound complicated, some user-friendly software and a little guidance is all you need to dramatically reduce the size of your music library without losing any songs.
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Decode MP3 Files
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Download and install Winamp (see Resources below). The standard Winamp install has the tools you need to convert your MP3 files to WAV format ("decode" them).
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Open Winamp. Go to "Preferences." Select the Nullsoft Diskwriter plugin as "Output" and click "Configure."
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Choose the directory you want to use for your WAV files. Make sure the disk has plenty of space because WAV files are bigger than their MP3 counterparts.
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Make a playlist with the files you want to convert.
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Press "Play." At this point, Winamp will convert all of the files in your playlist to WAV files and save them to the directory you've chosen.
Re-Encode the Files at a Lower Bit Rate
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Download and install Audacity (see Resources below). This free program will do most of the heavy lifting for the remainder of the process.
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Download and install the LAME encoder to the folder of your choice. Audacity requires this to export MP3 files.
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Open Audacity. Click "File" then "Open." Here, you can choose the WAV file you want to encode.
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Go to "File" then "Preferences." Click "File Formats." This will bring up a drop-down menu in which you can choose the bit rate at which you'd like to encode your WAV file. Your choice will become the default bit rate, so you'll need to change it back if you only want some of your files changed or if you want different bit rates for different files.
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Click "File" then "Export as MP3." A pop-up will let you name the file and choose where you want it to be stored.
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Step 6
Click "Save." Audacity will compress the file at the rate you've chosen.
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- Computer with Internet access
- Computer with Internet access
- It is important to choose the bit rate that best fits your individual needs. For the absolute best quality audio, a bit rate of 256 kbps is recommended. However, much lower bit rates are possible without losing too much quality. The default bit rate on most encoders is about 128 kbps. Moving down to 64 kbps will drastically reduce file size but maintain decent audio. Even lower bit rates are possible but not recommended unless reducing file size is significantly more important to you than quality.
- It is important to choose the bit rate that best fits your individual needs. For the absolute best quality audio, a bit rate of 256 kbps is recommended. However, much lower bit rates are possible without losing too much quality. The default bit rate on most encoders is about 128 kbps. Moving down to 64 kbps will drastically reduce file size but maintain decent audio. Even lower bit rates are possible but not recommended unless reducing file size is significantly more important to you than quality.
- The biggest downside to reducing bit rate is that quality goes down. For most people, especially when listening to music through earphones, this is not a huge issue, though.
Re-encoding your music at a higher rate will not improve the quality of your music. It will only serve to increase the size of the file, which is not useful at all. It may even result in worse sound quality.
- The biggest downside to reducing bit rate is that quality goes down. For most people, especially when listening to music through earphones, this is not a huge issue, though.
- Re-encoding your music at a higher rate will not improve the quality of your music. It will only serve to increase the size of the file, which is not useful at all. It may even result in worse sound quality.
[lee]
