easy way to compress a wav file?

[21Rouge]

I have some sound clips....maybe around 5 to 10 mgs..wav files. What is the simplest way to compress them to be able to send them more easily as email attachments?Thanks for your advice

[ColonelPanic]

I would put them into MP3 format, you'll see a considerable difference in size. If they don't have to be of high quality, you can lower the bitrate and quality settings to get a tiny file. If you're running Windows, I really don't know how to help you there as far as what utilities you could use.However, if you have iTunes (on the Mac at least, I'm thinking Windows may be similar) you can load the wav's into your library then right click them, hit "Convert selection to MP3." You may need to set iTunes up to encode in mp3, you can do that in the preferences. After they're converted, navigate to where your iTunes library is and attach to an e-mail.If the person on the other end intends to use the clips as system sounds in windows though, MP3's won't help as last time I checked windows doesn't support mp3's for system sounds. So the person would need to reconvert them to wav (which I think you can also do in iTunes.)Opening the file in Audacity, a most excellent multi-platform sound file editor may also work. You can export the wav as an MP3. However, you need to have LAME installed to do the encoding, which doesn't come along with the Audacity install since the MP3 technology is patented. You can find it on the net somewhere. Or, Audacity can save in Ogg Vorbis which is a free form of compressing audio files right out of the box... But the person on the other end probably wouldn't be able to play them since it's an oddball (but actually a really good) format. I don't know if the popular media players play it, VLC does.

[Atomic]

If you want to send the files as attachments, then you could use something like WinZip to create ONE large zip file, then go to http://www.yousendit.com, register for a free account, and you can send a single file at a time of up to 100MB.It's a free FTP site I use whenever I need to send something like that.Just a thought.