Advice needed on recording voice narration

[SharonAPPC]

We are recording voice narration to accompany a training CD (something like a powerpoint presentation run in kiosk mode but programmed with VB). There are many different sessions and it will run to around 300 "slides" with around 10 secs-2 minutes of voice-over per slide. We are trying to minimize the number of CDs we'd be needing for the whole training.

We are currently recording at 11kHz sampling rate, 16-bit, mono.

Are there better settings we could use that would not be too low-quality and won't increase the file size, or even lower it a bit? Is WAV the best format? We want it to be playable on any PC.

Thank you!

[bugster]

mp2 audio is highly compressed and should be playable on any PC.

[SharonAPPC]

Thanks for the response! Now my problem is that SoundForge does not seem to have mp2 as one of the formats for "save as." I think we also tried using mp3 at the beginning but it wouldn't play once incorporated into the program. I'll have to check with our programmer on what application actually does the playing, I guess.

[kupton]

If you're looking to shrink file size MP3 is your best bet. Your sampling rate/bit rate is already about as low as you can go so compression is the next logical step. If you cant use MP3 another option is the OGG format but if your program can't use MP3 then OGG might be a stretch. See if you can get MP3 to work...

Also try 11kHz 8 bit mono and see if that sounds ok

[secretagent]

64 khz 16 bit mono mp3

[bugster]

Thanks for the response! Now my problem is that SoundForge does not seem to have mp2 as one of the formats for "save as."

Besweet.
TmpGenc
HeadAc3he

will all convert wav to mp2.