recording into laptop using audacity
 

I straight recorded out of the soundboard into the laptop last night using audacity....

the part that I recorded was 25 minutes or so long

the file was 170MB anyway to make this smaller???

Need to concert it to MP3. Other than that I think that is all you can do. Other than editing it.

I converted to .wav


maybe i shoulda did mp3

Well first of all if you are going to burn it to a CD, in this case size does not matter but length of time does.

Second and most importantly with Audacity, you need to export it as an MP3 file. And if I remember right, with audacity, you need to download a "LAME" plug in.

We use Audacity. We used to save it as .au format but I kept telling the sound guys to convert it to mp3 since we are recording so others can listen...why go and edit it later on then? So rather than save it as the audacity file format I told them let's just export it as mp3 as soon as we finish recording

Wav files are larger but better in quality, but for simple preaching you don't really need it.

It's 100% free..... :-) and you can plug in a ton of stuff that you can find
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Here is another interesting one
http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/

Agape, if you save as OGG format it is the quickest and it will convert to MP3 faster for the OGG is native. To make smaller files, choose a smaller wavelength. 128 as opposed to 192 will shorten the size considerably.

Audacity is open source and works great. We had the blessing of finding a pair of 1 GIG memory sticks in a yard sale for $10, and we have a 30 or 40 GIG drive so large files are not a worry for our sound. We have 100% eliminated tapes.