Exact Audio Copy file size questions

My compression settings are at 128kb/Low quality.

In the EAC window, it says a song's compression size will be 3.48 MB.

However, it is saving to my hard drive at 4,400 KB (which is 4.30 MB).

Why is is it saving at a larger size? Is there anything I can do to reduce the size is saving at.

What other settings can I change in order to reduce to file size a small amount that won't effect sound quality too much?

 

Those sizes are estimates, there simply is no way to know the resulting file sizes unless you're encoding in CBR mode (not recommended because VBR yields better quality).

If you need smaller files, you'll have to encode at lower bitrates (this obviously will affect sound quality) or switch to a more efficient compression format like AAC (not supported by many older devices which only support MP3).

 

I lowered the bit rate to 64 from 128 and the file size is the exact same.

How can this be?

The file sizes do change in the EAC window, but not on my hard drive.

 

Try defragmenting

 

Why/how would fragmentation affect the final files size of the conversion?

Gary

 

I don't know how you've set up EAC, but after your previous threads I'm going to guess that you're using an external encoder (lame.exe), have set this up in EAC's compression options ("Use external program for compression") and are now trying to use the "Bit rate" dropdown menu in the same place.

That won't work unless you use a special placeholder in the command line options textbox - if you don't, the setting chosen in the dropdown menu is irrelevant (same goes for the quality option directly below).

But you shouldn't be using that menu anyway, for the best quality you're supposed to use LAME's built-in presets. You want to set it up this way:



Here's the full options line, copy and paste it into the "Additional command-line options" text box in EAC's compression options:

-V2 --id3v2-only --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tg "%m" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

The -V switch at the beginning of the line controls quality (and therefore file sizes). Possible values are 0-9, with 0 being best quality (and biggest files), higher values decrease quality and file sizes. 2 is a good value to start with (transparent compression for most people), but since you're looking for small files you should experiment with higher values (3, 4, 5,...) until you find some sort of compromise between quality and size. More info here.