Creating small MP3 audio file from VOB?

[j_hallgren]

I've been looking thru many posts here (for last 8 hrs) and found various free pgms, such as BeSweet (which I just tried via the BeLight GUI)...the 3 min input VOB (extracted from a DVD of a meeting) created a file of 3145KB...which was at 334kbps, as I understand it...

When I created a test (spoken input) WMA file via WinMediaEncoder, I was able to select voice quality of 19kbps, which seems more appropriate given that audio on both is just voice, and output file was 250KB...

So what options should I use on BeSweet to get a similar tiny file? Because 3MB for 3 min is way too big given that my goal is to create a podcast type file of maybe 2hrs of input.

[jimmalenko]

WMA is more compressive than MP3 by design, but you should still be able to choose 32kbps in Belight.

[celtic_druid]

For low bitrates aac (he/ps) is good or vorbis. For pure voice encoding a dedicated encoder like Speex should do a better job. Still a 32k mp3 if it is just speech should sound ok. You will need to resample down from 48KHz though although the encoder should do that automatically.

[j_hallgren]

You will need to resample down from 48KHz

So I would do so in the SSRC "sampling rate" option, correct? And what value might you suggest instead of 44100 default? (Update: Tried using this option...get error 47 with lame.dll - quitting)
I'm using the quality option 30 which says 96kbps. Should I switch/try bitrate option so I can get it to the 32 you mentioned? (Tried this...got same error 47! <-- UPD: had to set use constant bitrate to work)

2nd update: tried 32 kbps...got output file of 751KB which is MUCH better...quality seems ok!

3rd update: The 751KB file lost about half the volume...so what did I muck up?