How do I fit 90 minutes of audio on a 80 minute CD?

Chris H wrote on 5/11/2004, 8:28 PM
I am transferring cassette tapes of a family oral history to CD. I have brought the audio into the Vegas timeline and rendered to a .wav file with the default compression rate. I am using Roxio EZ CD Creator to burn to audio CD. The default compression rate leaves my project too long to fit on one CD. I then tried rendering the timeline with two differnt lower compression settings. The sizes of these files are 620 MB and 320 MB. When I try to burn a music CD using Roxio and these files they still show up as 84 minutes long. Roxio spits out my CD and says my 700 MB CD does not have enough room.

Is there any way I can fit 90 minutes of audio onto a 700 MB (80 min) blank CD-R using Vegas to render. I have to make 80 copies of the oral history and I would rather burn 80 CDs than have to split the project up over 2 CDs and burn 160 copies.

Thanks for your help,

Chris

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 5/11/2004, 8:42 PM
Chris,

The simple and only answer is,... you don't. A "Red Book" standard audio CD is uncompressed, 44.1k, 16bit stereo. Period. Audio CDs are not compressed, nor can they be. There is no such thing as a lower compression setting.

You can only fit 80 minutes on a 700 MB CD. You can find 90 minute CDs, they are rare and may not be compatible with all CD players, nevertheless, a 90 minute CD is the only way to fit 84 minutes on an audio CD. There is no other way around this and still have it play on a standard audio CD player.

John
Chris H wrote on 5/11/2004, 8:52 PM
Thanks.
MichaelS wrote on 5/11/2004, 9:03 PM
John is right, but depending on the content, this may help. Often during presentations, there are long pauses that can be edited out. Even pauses between sentences can be shortened without damaging the flow. Also consider using "time stretch" from a program such as Sound Forge to reduce the length by speeding up the program, while retaining the pitch. Depending on the content, you may or may not be able to get it down to 80 minutes without overly sacrificing quality. But the key word is sacrifice...quality and your time.

Good luck!
johnmeyer wrote on 5/11/2004, 9:32 PM
You can get more than 80 minutes by using "overburning," but you will be in uncharted territory, and the result may not play on all CD players.

You can also convert to MP3 and put ten hours or more on a "CD," but it will only play on newer CD players that play MP3 files. Actually, if the audio in mono, you can double the amount you can put on MP3 files without decreasing the quality. I fit over 100 cassettes of family audio tapes (fifty years of audio correspondence between Europe and the U.S.) onto just three CDs by using MP3 files. The audio was indistinguishable from the original (the originals were recorded on cheap home tape decks, so I couldn't do much damage).

farss wrote on 5/11/2004, 10:28 PM
I make a lot of 'talking book' material. If its mostly spoken word why not use mp3 compression?
If you only need to shrink it down a liitle you could go for quite a high bitrate and eaily fit it on. Not too much around these days that doesn't play mp3 either. Tools are already in Vegas!
For archival purposes mp3 is possibly better than CD as well. Being recorded as data files means there's much better error correction.
I'm not commenting on the quality of mp3 versus CD, just on how well it'll survive.
jester700 wrote on 5/12/2004, 4:45 AM
For archiving, I prefer standard WAV files. 16/44.1 uncompressed AND extra error correction. Of course, you get even less on a blank than with CD audio.

I like the time stretch/editing ideas if compatibilty is important.
RafalK wrote on 5/12/2004, 5:16 AM
You could also do CTRL-DRAG to squish it a bit. I am saying you could because the result will obviously be slightly sped up audio although going from 90 to 80 minutes might be very little difference. Give it a try, if you like the result, it might be a simple and quick solution.
johnmeyer wrote on 5/12/2004, 8:41 AM
farss,

Great point about MP3 being a data format rather than audio and therefore benefiting from the superior error correction!
Chienworks wrote on 5/12/2004, 9:43 AM
For an example of cutting out pauses, consider our regular Sunday morning church service. The service usually runs about 80 to 85 minutes, but i need to fit the entire thing in 79.5 minutes for a 700MB CD-R. I can usually cut out a couple minutes' worth of pauses inbetween sections (the praise & worship team leaving the stage, etc.). Also, i can cut out pauses between phrases in the sermon. A typical sermon lasts 30 minutes but can often be shortened to 26 simply by looking for large (1 second or longer) empty spaces and slicing them out. No one ever seems to notice the difference. No time stretching (or is it squishing in this case?) is required. The whole procedure takes me about 20 minutes in Sound Forge including slicing up the tracks, noise reduction, and wave-hammering.
MichaelS wrote on 5/12/2004, 4:14 PM
Back in the "olden" days of radio, I spliced a lot of tape. That's where I developed my on little "Rule of 1/2". When shortening pauses, I'd use my trusty grease pencil to mark the in/out of the space, then with razor blade in hand, remove about 1/2 of the tape. It almost never failed to sound better. Still today, I look at the wave form and mark about half of the space...click, click...voila! This is proven true by radio professionals. A good broadcaster will instinctively "tighten up" the spaces when delivering "live " commercials, etc.

Oh well...back to my Wollensack...
Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/12/2004, 6:02 PM
... back to my Wollensack...

Wow, Michael, you are dating yourself big time! I haven't seen a Wollensack in eons! ;o)

J--
PeterWright wrote on 5/12/2004, 6:04 PM
If you haven't already done it, you could edit the audio down - not just shortening the spaces, but cutting out the repetitions, unneccessary rambles and unwanted bits, just as you would with video.