Saturday 28 December 2013

Shrinking .WAV files to keep an AOL user very happy

Having rebuilt my aunt's PC over the Christmas break, upgrading her ( well, the PC ) from Windows XP SP3 to Windows 7 SP1, I also needed to install her favourite AOL desktop.

The AOL software has a nifty feature where it "talks" to the user when you start the software ( "Welcome to AOL" ), and when you log on ( "You have email" ).

My aunt prefers the dulcet tones of Joanna Lumley ( and, as a big Joanna fan, I can't say I blame her ), whereas AOL seem to think that a butch ( and quite fake-sounding ) US accent is much better.

Thankfully, having hit this problem ( when I upgraded here from Windows 98 to Windows XP ), I'd made a backup of the Joanna voices.

Sadly, when I tried to add the backed up voices ( .WAV files ) into the new AOL 9.7 desktop software, it whinged because the .WAV files were greater than 60 KB in size.

Thankfully, Google had the answer: -


In short, it was a simple matter of downloading/installing Audacity, opening up each of the .WAV files and then saving them in monaural format, thus shrinking them below 60 KB.

Seemples, as Aleksander would say :-)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I didn't even know AOL was still around

Visual Studio Code - Wow 🙀

Why did I not know that I can merely hit [cmd] [p]  to bring up a search box allowing me to search my project e.g. a repo cloned from GitHub...