a brand new user

[robchristiansen]

win98
64 megs ram
8.4 gig harddrive

I’m a brand new user. Just the other day I downloaded “dBpowerAMP music
conversion” (it surprised me, it was free!) and have digitized a tune (I think that’s the right terminology). I don’t have speakers on my computer and can’t listen to it, but the little sound-meter shows lines dancing around which indicates that there is music there and that it did indeed work. OK, so then I went and uploaded it onto my website. (Took a long time).

But now I read at “download.com” that maybe I don’t need to upload at all but simply give it to them and establish a link to my account with them and they’ll take care of everything. Is that right? I gotta believe there’s a price for this.

I checked around your website for reading material for beginners like me, but if it’s there, I couldn’t find it.

Please help me out.

[ChristinaS]

Re: a brand new user

win98
64 megs ram
8.4 gig harddrive

I’m a brand new user. Just the other day I downloaded “dBpowerAMP music
conversion” (it surprised me, it was free!) and have digitized a tune (I think that’s the right terminology). I don’t have speakers on my computer and can’t listen to it, but the little sound-meter shows lines dancing around which indicates that there is music there and that it did indeed work. OK, so then I went and uploaded it onto my website. (Took a long time).

But now I read at “download.com” that maybe I don’t need to upload at all but simply give it to them and establish a link to my account with them and they’ll take care of everything. Is that right? I gotta believe there’s a price for this.

I checked around your website for reading material for beginners like me, but if it’s there, I couldn’t find it.

Please help me out.

In order for a file to get onto a web site from a pc it has to be uploaded. Unless of course your pc is set up to be a web server with all the bells and whistles, including an ip address from some service like www.noip.com and remain connected to the internet preferably through a high-speed conneciton all the time. I doubt that with a pc such as yours you could do this anyway.

Not sure what download.com has to do with your uploading to your web site. If the song is to be from the download.com website, then you have to upload it to download.com - either way you have to upload somewhere.

No idea what you're actually trying to do. It may help if you told us how to get to your website and what file is involved.

[robchristiansen]

Re: a brand new user

OK, so now I have mp3 file loaded on website and it works! Another mp3 file I tried is 3 times larger, however, a takes 1.5 hours to download to play. Unacceptable! This song is from a cd my sister wrote.All I really need is just a snippet (a sample) maybe a minute or so long. Is there someway to extract just a minute or so of the song and disregard the rest?

[ChristinaS]

Re: a brand new user

How big (so how slow to download/upload) and mp3 file depends on 2 factors: the actual duration of the song and the bitrate that it was encoded at. The lower the bitrate, the smaller the file, the faster the transfers.

So you ahve either encoded the song at too high a bitrate or indeed it is 3 times longer.

For the web you need to think in terms of dial up users (like yourself) as well as high-speed internet users. You really should have 2 versions of a song, one for each target audience.

For dial-up you should limit the bitrate to 32-48 kbps. Since at this low bitrate mp3 tends to be rather poor quality, .wma is recommended, as it will sound much better.

For high-speed connections you can use 128kbps and up. Beyond 192 kbps there is no adavantage really. You can encode to 192kbps mp3. This will take 3 times more space that the file encoded at 32kbps.


You can calculate in this manner:

1 minute uncompressed .wav (or .cda) = 10MB

1 minute compressed at 128kbps = 1MB (either mp3 or wma)
1 minute compressed at 32kbps = 250KB ( either mp3 or wma)

You will need the 32kbps in order to play a file on the interent with a dial up connection of 56kbps. Since wma is better sounding at that bitrate, this is what you should be using.


If you want to edit a wav or an mp3 file and select just a portion of it, you can use the program Audacity (free) from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[robchristiansen]

wma will not install

I have win98. Dial-up, slow modem. You told me for a long song (large mp3 file) to use the .wma format. I assume this means windows media audio. My machine told me that it wasn’t installed, but that I could download it. So I did ... or tried.
I assured that db-wmfdist-wma9.exe was in the same directory as the music converter, but it still says, “it is not installed.” Something I saw might be the problem: Before I downloaded it indicated that maybe it wouldn’t work on win98

[LtData]

Re: wma will not install

I have win98. Dial-up, slow modem. You told me for a long song (large mp3 file) to use the .wma format. I assume this means windows media audio. My machine told me that it wasn’t installed, but that I could download it. So I did ... or tried.
I assured that db-wmfdist-wma9.exe was in the same directory as the music converter, but it still says, “it is not installed.” Something I saw might be the problem: Before I downloaded it indicated that maybe it wouldn’t work on win98

Did you follow the instructions here?: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/wma9-nt.txt