The difference between recording time and recording size
Question:
I am confused about: An 80 minute CD is 640 megabytes…Yet after I have copied an audio casette with Audacity and put it into I Tunes and start to burn to a CD, Properties shows it to be 2 hours long, yet 139 megabytes. What is the relationship between megabytes and real time. It is not just the tape transfer, but a lot of my audio AND video files are inconsistant. Help me with this one.
Answer:
Think of it as gas mileage on a car: You’re driving 50 miles, and car A (a Ford truck) gets 20 mpg, and car B (a small Honda) gets 40 mpg.
Both cars drive the same distance, yet use different amounts of gas.
In a similar way, one recording on a PC can use more megabytes than another. This is largely due to quality. The lower the quality of the playback, the less megabytes the finished product will take.
Finally, to address the CD issue: When you burn audio to a CD, the CD recording is set to a certain quality level - that level is such that 80 minutes of audio will take 640 megs.
Leave a comment