If you need to send an audio file via email, you may face a problem of its size – it can be quite large and take a lot of space on the web. Fortunately, there is an easy solution – compressing the file to a smaller size. In this article, we will show you how to do it using the free Audacity program.
First, you need to download Audacity from the web and install it on your computer. Once you have it installed, open the program and click on File, then Import, and then Audio. Find the audio file on your computer and open it. Audacity will prompt you to make a copy of the file, which you should do to avoid editing the original.
If you haven’t already cleaned up the file and used the noise reduction and other effects in Audacity, this is a good time to do that. Once you’ve done all that, click on File, then Export, and choose the location where you want to put the file. Give it a file name and then choose the save as type – for the web, a good file type is mp3.
If you haven’t installed the mp3 decoder for Audacity, you’ll want to do that – it’s a free download. Click on the Options button and choose the bitrate mode – if it’s a high-quality file, you’ll see the bitrate will be 192 KBS or something like that. If the file you’re wanting to compress is a spoken file, you can reduce that bitrate right down to even 32 KB/s to get it smaller – the quality will still be there, and you’ll get a much smaller file. You can do this a couple of times to see what works best.
Once you’ve chosen the bitrate, click OK, and Audacity will compress the file for you. It may take a few seconds, depending on the size of the file. The compressed file will be much smaller than the original one – for example, from 65 MB down to 2 MB or even less.
You can play the compressed file to check the quality – it should sound good with no distortion. If you’re not satisfied with the size or quality, you can compress it again at a lower bitrate. Once you’ve got the file to the size you want, you can send it via email.
To summarize, if you need to compress an audio file for email, download and install the free Audacity program, open the file in Audacity, choose the save as type (mp3), select the bitrate mode, and compress the file. You can do this a couple of times to get the size and quality you want. With this easy process, you can easily send large audio files via email.