ConCen

I have a couple of larger mp3 files (from a roundtable interview) that I'd like to distribute, but the size is a bit larger than it has to be and they have some background noise that I want to remove.

Does anyone know of some decent software and/or techniques that I could employ to convert these to high(er) quality compressed mp3 files. I have Audacity, which looks good and I've done some clipping with it, but I'm a nooblet in sound editing / filtering / compression.

Any and all advice appreciated!

dbPowerAmp converters and filters are great. If you really want to go nuts, then get something like Sound Forge for all the bells and whistles. Both are available in paid or torrent distributions.;)

Try Audacity, it's open source and works really well.

I messed with audacity for about 2 minutes and it worked wonders with the noise reduction filter. Great program.

Sound Forge: http://www.rlslog.net/sony-sound-forge-pro-v100-union/

dbpoweramp is probably the best thing for conversions... especially with mp3s... they use the lame codec.

For wave editing, I suggest Adobe Audition, which used to be cool edit pro... also, you can download some vst plugins for it, like the waves packs, that have pro level dsp noise reduction, eq's, and so on...

the best noise reduction software takes a sample of the noise. if you have any spaces in your sound with just the noise, use this as a template and you will virtually iradicate all noise. dont go crazy or it will start to sound very odd