Sunday, March 13, 2005 at 3:26 PM
Edited Sunday, March 13, 2005 at 3:33 PM Wait -- what happened? I just converted Thursday night's show to wma and it went from 37MB to 285MB. Is there some other setting I need to change? —steve What are you using? It sounds like you're converting an mp3 to a non-lossy WMA, which software allows you to do though it really doesn't make sense. :) The advantage to doing what I suggested is that theres no format conversion or resampling/re-encoding involved in the process -- all of that is bad for the audio quality. In a nutshell heres what I do/did: 1.) Download sdp here http://sdp.ppona.com/.
2.) unzip, install, and run sdp 2.0
3.) Go to Click on the green "Open" Button or go to File -> Open. and then paste the 91x direct link in to the textbox. It's in the faq, or you can just cut and paste this: mms://ccdig.liquidviewer.com/xtra.
4.) Click the Red "Go" button.
5.) Pick where you want to save the file of the recording, and the name, and click "Save."
6.) When you're done, click the blue "Abort" button.
7.) You're done! :)
8.) Though, you might want to make note of the VCR option. You can set it to automatically record at a given time daily. Unforrunately, theres no weekly schedule option. I started on a hack that would fix that, but I haven't finished it yet. What you'll have when you're done is a 100% authentic copy of what was streamed -- unless your internet connection is flakey, or something like that. What you want to avoid doing -- espeically with lossy input that's already low quality is converting it from one format to another format (wma to mp3), or re-encoding it. Doing this always adds more digital artifacts (the "drain pipe sounds", etc) to the audio and in general reduces the fidelity. This is especially true when your source is already encoded at a pretty low-bitrate (like the 91x stream -- 33kbps). If all of this sounds a little greek to you, you might want check out the wikipeida article on lossy compression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy I'll get a WMA of tonight's show and post it online, if you're interested in comparing. —ZT | 
