looking for that sweet spot

[Dewittian]

I'm loading sections of my tunes for streaming and I used the advanced
streaming .WMA audio out. It sounds good but the file size is kinda
large. I can use MP3 but the only way I can find to lessen the file
size is to lower the bit rate. I usually use 192 and speed/quality
setting 1.

The music is Ambient so the sound quality has to be good but I also
don't want people to have to wait to long for their players to
startup. Any advice on the compression verses file size? The sample
is currently at www.dewittian.com I'm just building the site so bear
with me on the work in progress.

[Gary R. Hook]

If your web server is really streaming there should be almost no
delay before playback begins. if you're seeing a delay that is
dependent upon filesize it's most likely due to the server _not_
streaming but rather fully downloading.

That said, if you are only making a portion of the tune available,
leave the quality high. One presumes that a 60 second snippet @
192 KHz is only going to be appr. 1 or 1.5 MB in size. That's not
so large any more.

Finally, we _hate_ Quicktime. Don't embed the player in your page.
Leave that up to the user, or use myspace to showcase your tunes.
Your page wouldn't load properly in Firefox, and in IE every one of
the players tried to play simultaneously. Bad programming.

Advice: use .mp3 (get winlame for your encoding).

--
Gary R. Hook
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Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit