There is nothing more annoying than waiting forever and a half to finish downloading a 50mb RMXP game whose only non-rtp resources are seven MP3's. It pisses me off to no end trying to cram a bunch of 5-10mb songs onto a cheap 256mb MP3 player, or really wanting to upload a certain song that's 6mb onto a site with a upload size limit of 4.5mb.
For the past month I've been using a program called MP3Resizer that did a good job on cutting the file size down considerably without affecting the quality at all. Unfortunately, I only had a free trial of 30 days, and it comes to a close in about an hour for me. Being the poor college student that I am, I'm obviously not going to pay to keep the full program, but I haven't found a cracked version or free version of it anywhere either. So, it's time to start looking for an alternate program.
What good free programs are there that can simply reduce the size of an audio file (more specifically an MP3 file)?
Just drop the bitrate. If an MP3 is something like 320kbps the file is going to be huge. Dropping it to something like 128kbps or even 96kbps would be exactly what you need. I use SUPER(c) to do this since it handles both audio and video encoding.
or you could convert to a smaller and less lossy filetype like .ogg for RMXP, though I do'nt know if your music player will run that.
you could also..you know...ask someone 'bout that file size reducer..
God, programs like that are essentially scams. I bet it uses LAME to re-encode the MP3s you throw at it too, and LAME is free.
Iuse CDex (1.70) for encoding to MP3, and dbPowerAmpMC or whatever it's called for vorbis (.ogg).
I use Audacity to convert things, myself.
and SynthFont for .midi files, when I convert to .ogg for RMXP