A few of my COs in the past haven't been all that tech-savvy, so I figured I'd write out a post on how I convert audio. Considering TeamSpeak outputs uncompressed raw PCM files, an event meeting can easily push up past the half-gigabyte size. Not only does that make hosting difficult, but people are much less likely to actually download and listen to them in such a state.
Firstly, you'll need a free program called
Audacity (at the moment, there is a separate version for Vista/Win7, so choose the one that you need) and the
LAME codec for it.
Install Audacity as normal. Extract the .dll in the ZIP file to any location you desire; I suggest inside the folder you installed Audacity to. If you're running Vista or Win7, right click audacity.exe, choose Properties, the Compatibility tab, and set it to run in Compatibility mode for XP-SP3 and to run as an administrator. This will cause a UAC window each time you run the program, but it's much less troublesome that way.
Open Audacity. Go to File>Import>Audio... (or Ctrl-Shift-i) and select the TeamSpeak recording. Let it finish importing (you can see the progress as the wave band replaces the crosshatching in the console). Now, go to File>Export... and choose a location for the new file. Set "Save as type:" to MP3 files and click the "Options..." button. Here you can set the quality settings for the resulting file. I haven't really played with this so much, so if you want to REALLY get your compressed size down, you may want to do a bit of research into it. For this guide (and resulting file sizes at the end), I used an Average bitrate at 32kbps with Joint Stereo. After you click Save, audacity will ask you for the location of the .dll file you placed at the beginning. After locating it, a new box will pop open asking for ID3 tag information. It's optional to fill out, but there's no harm in doing it. Afterward, the computer will start to chew through the encoding. When it's done, voila! When you go to close Audacity, it will ask you if you want to save before closing; don't worry, your MP3 is saved. It's asking if you'd like to save an Audacity Project that you could use to continue editing later...but, we're done!
Result:
Initial file: PCM WAV, 56m49s in length, 1536kbps;
624mbResulting file: LAME MP3, 35kbps (32kbps average);
14.4mbConsidering the codec TeamSpeak uses is generally under 32kbps (the one in use for the Philippine Phandango command meetings is 7.57kbps), there isn't any real loss of quality.
