file size for streaming MP3

[gunardson]

I have a music player on a site that I just finished and was wondering what anyone's thoughts might be on the size of the streaming MP3's. The ones that are up there now are SWF's around 1.5 MB in size. The actual MP3 are running at 32 KB/S.
Just wondering if I could go with 64 KB/s without screwing anyone that's listening to the music on the site. 64 KB/s is gonna increase the SWF size to around 2 MB a song. Is that too much?
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The site is http://www.hot-fat.com

[gunardson]

I figure that if the file size of the MP3 is smaller than the users connection, it should play fine and not stutter. So if I the website is streaming a MP3 at 32 KB/s and a user is connected at 56K it should play fine, regardless of the size of the overall song SWF. Anything over 56K, say 64 KB/s, is a gamble.
Any thoughts?

[SwiftTools]

You have the answer in the question. The key with MP3 compression is the throughput, when compressing a song (whatever) you usually specify a throughput which is expressed as 'kilo bits per second' (aka bitrate). So regardless of the original sound characteristics (stereo or not), the resulting thoughput is always the same. (VBR is off topic)

This throughput is the one needed to *playback* a sound without stuttering. So if the network bandwith cannot deliver with the same throughput, the player will certainly run out of data, thus will wait for more to sustain a normal playback. The result is stuttering.

A 56k connection is actually at maximum of 53333 bits per second. Compressing a sound at 48kps seems to be fine, assuming that the overall throughput (from the server to the client) is steady.

Many sites propose two or more connection types so as to properly deliver the stream. I suggest you offer something like low/high bandwith links.
Drawback: you have to compress the sound with as many different rates as you want to offer to visitors.
Do not expect the same quality of course.

And filesize has nothing to do with this.
The computation is simple: filesize is always sound duration muliplied by compression thoughput.
e.g: a 3 mins long song compressed at 48kbps:
180 secs * 48000kbps = 8640000 bits =
1080000 bytes ~ 1Mbyte

MP3 players do the reverse computation to figure out sound duration

I hope this was not a too technical answer and could clarify.

Swift

[gunardson]

Not too technical... Mostly makes sense to me. Thanks!