Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

Hi Scott,

The site looks neat! Thanks for the upgrade!

- Kit

Thanks for letting me know, Scott.

Hi Scott,

I searched for information on the forum regarding compressing/zipping files and found this thread.

I need to shrink an MP3 file from 23MB to under 10MB so that it can be e-mailed.

Is 7-zip the best way to do this or should I try something else?

Thanks,
Brad

I should have mentioned in the previous post that this MP3 file is going to several different recipients. From what I read on 7-zip's support and forum pages it seems that you need to have 7-zip installed on your computer in order to "unpack" the separate volumes back into the original MP3 file. I doubt that any of my recipients have 7-zip installed on their computers nor are they computer savvy enough to use it.

Is there an "easier" way to accomplish the e-mailing of these MP3 files?

(Just for clarification, what I am doing is using to record our church sermons and convert them to MP3's so that our members can listen to the sermons on MP3 players or CD's that I burn for them. I suppose if there isn't an easier way to e-mail the MP3's, I will have to consider making lower quality MP3's through Audacity to make the file size more manageable. I appreciate any of your thoughts on this as well.)

Thanks!
-Brad

Well, maybe I'm not the savvy one then, because it seemed to me that to explain it to my recipients would be a bit more complicated than a simple right click. I'm learning, though...

Thanks for your help. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Have a good day!

-Brad

I just remembered an option that might be easier for the recipients, as it would not require any software to be installed on their end. The program is , and it is also free. The concept is the same: split the file, send it in pieces, and reassemble at the destination. The difference is that it creates an assembler program (that does not need to be installed) that you send with the files. I used to use this program before I started putting 7-Zip on all of my systems and it worked very well for me. If you try it, let me know how it works for you, Scott.

Hello Scott,

I haven't had time this week to work with , but I was intrigued by right away for some reason, so I downloaded it. It is a very interesting little program and it seems to work quite well. (Although it is an older program, I had no trouble installing and using it on my Windows 7 desktop.)

The File Splitter would require these steps of the recipients: 1) They would have to create a sub-folder in which to copy and paste all of the "pieces" of the file. 2) They would have to rename the executable file (which reassembles the pieces) from "filename.exe_ok" to "filename.exe" since their e-mail program (specifically Outlook for me) does not allow executable files to be opened as such. 3) They would simply have to click on the executable file which would reassemble the MP3 into that same sub-folder. Not too difficult, really.

The only other thing that bothers me is the time and number of e-mails it takes to send all of the file pieces (each recipient would receive anywhere from 6-10 e-mails per week).

I'm continuing to work all of this out and I'll let you know what I eventually end up doing. Thanks for your help and guidance!

-Brad

Maybe you and your customers use a new E-Mail address just for the purpose?

I don't think G-Mail has such a limit

Another (better) option would be for you to put the files on a web page, FTP or file sharing site such as or , where they could just click on them to download directly. That way no email limitations such as file splitting and recombining would be involved. Let me know what you end up doing, and why... Scott.