I'm looking to add sound clips to a site for an aspiring opera singer. Her existing files are very large ( 2+ mb) and although I can post them that way, they obviously aren't very user friendly for dial-up visitors. Any help with how to compress exisiting audio files if we can;'t afford a sound studio remix and the best format to post them in would be very much appreciated.
Eric
Have you thought about encoding it to ogg vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com).
I would take a look at just about any website that deals with audio and see what they are using. I think most people would agree that MP3 is currently the most popular and highly compressed audio format. Depending on how long your sound clips are (and at what quality), MP3 is probably your best bet. Also popular are streaming formats like Real Audio and Window's Media Player. Any of those will bring down the size of your files considerably. Regardless, you'll need to find software that can encode your audio into whatever format you choose.