multimedia and the TG-50

[dante21]

I have two MSs one is 64MB and the other is 128MB. I then relized that these can't really hold much. My question is what do you guys have on your MS I have the Animatrix on one and about four songs on the 64MB stick I just got the 128.

[alan98]

I got 1 album of mp3, programs (Bible, dictionary,games etc), 2 video (40MB) all on my 128MB stick.

[TechnoCat]

dante, the trick to getting a lot on is to be very careful with how you encode. For example, if you rip a track from a CD using the default settings for most encoders, or if you download a "shared" one, it's going to be very high bitrate. Lots of bytes per second. But the Clie and most MP3 players aren't exactly hifi, you aren't playing them through big speakers, and you may play them in noisy places (like near computers or, in my case, on airplanes.)

Under those circumstances, you could get by with probably half the bitrate, making the songs half the size. For some types of rock and heavy metal, I find 80Kbit fine, as long as sampling is set to 32, joint stereo is used, a cutoff no higher than 15kHz is used, I'll be using sub-$50 headphones, and it's a noisy environment anyhow. Lots of caveats, but all are true most of the time, at least for me.

Debussy, however, doesn't do nearly as well at low bitrates. And something with more textures, like Toy Matinee, needs more bitrate also. So I am somewhat contextual on encoding parameters.

Video is similar. Something like South Park just doesn't need the great color depth and high framerate. (Heck, Flash could do South Park!)

[kusumo]

dante21, where did u get the Animatrix. I'm interested. Thanks.

[dante21]

Hey Techno Cat is there any program I can do that in. I don't know how to do it in any other program that I have (I have Nero does that count). Kusumo I just went to google and got it off the Animatrix website. Or you can go to Kazaa. Techno if you have any thoughts on how I can do this (cutting bitrates in half) I would appreciate it it could save me a TON of money!

[paxton]

Hi,

I am happy with Easy CD-DA Extractor (use the converter module). It's a little bit pricy but worth its money I think: http://www.poikosoft.com/

You can just batch encode the mp3s to the memorystick with automated normalizing etc. Very handy.

[TechnoCat]

Originally posted by dante21
Hey Techno Cat is there any program I can do that in. I don't know how to do it in any other program that I have (I have Nero does that count). Kusumo I just went to google and got it off the Animatrix website. Or you can go to Kazaa. Techno if you have any thoughts on how I can do this (cutting bitrates in half) I would appreciate it it could save me a TON of money!
Take a look at LAME, which is an MP3 encoder. You'll probably want the RazorLame front-end also. LAME is at http://www.mp3dev.org/

Basically you decode to WAV and re-encode to the preferred rate. Of course it's always best to simply encode to the preferred rate directly from CD. LAME will do the decode internally, so it looks like one step. So your typical command line might look like this:
LAME -b 32 --abr 84 -mj --lowpass 13 --mp3input original_filename output_filename

RazorLame probably makes this real easy by giving you a GUI and menus. I'm not a big user of such things, so I don't know how much help it will be; I find command-lines more efficient. But then again, my first computer ran at a blazing 0.954MHz and had under 4KB of RAM, which is less than 0.03% of what comes on a Palm standard these days!

[dante21]

Most of the songs I have on my Memory card is from "sharing" sites so I will try those to see what I can do to them.