How do I bounce to a smaller file size?

[JaneBass1]

Someone asked me to mix a song for him. He basically recorded voice, guitar and bass. He asked me to record drum loops.

He only had the song as a full mp3 and not as single tracks, so when I open the file is a stereo track.

I recorded the drums with a midi in another track.

When I bounce both tracks, and with standard parameters (128kbps, fast-low quality), the file ends up being like 28MB.

What can I do to make this file a normal (less than 10MB) file?

I tried lowering the the rate to 48kbps and the size was still > 10 MB

What can I do?

[GarethBull]

Originally Posted by JaneBass1

Someone asked me to mix a song for him. He basically recorded voice, guitar and bass. He asked me to record drum loops.

He only had the song as a full mp3 and not as single tracks, so when I open the file is a stereo track.

I recorded the drums with a midi in another track.

When I bounce both tracks, and with standard parameters (128kbps, fast-low quality), the file ends up being like 28MB.

What can I do to make this file a normal (less than 10MB) file?

I tried lowering the the rate to 48kbps and the size was still > 10 MB

What can I do?

I'm going to make some really big guesses here, which could be all wrong, and I'm not trying to insult your intelligence, I'm just trying to clarify some information.

You recorded the drums with a midi what? Is the drum track you mixed onto the MP3 tracks a midi sequence or a standard audio recording (recorded from the midi sequence)?

When you mixed the drum track onto the MP3 you were given, did you convert the drum track to MP3 as well? Can you play the song on an MP3 player (or with an MP3 player program that is not part of your recording software on your computer) and hear your drum track as part of the song?

My suspicion is that your drum track is not in MP3 format and
you've only listened to the finished song using your recording software, which can handle playing different tracks that are in different formats at the same time. You should do a new conversion of the completed song into MP3 format, which should shrink the size of the song.

If my guess is wrong and you've already done that, I can't think of what else to suggest.

[JaneBass1]

The original song was in mp3 format, which I opened into a new stereo track

I recorded the drums with a midi keyboard, into a different track. This has like 30 regions of 30 samples I recorded into the song

I mixed both tracks and bounced both tracks into an mp3 file

I guess the problem is that I am using one full mp3 song and I am adding another track into it. Maybe I have too many regions into the drum track?

[JaneBass1]

I was able to fix the error.

In the project I had like 10 tracks.

1 track for the mp3 i opened, another track with the drum samples. The rest of the tracks were single drum samples which I later put together into the 2nd track.

I was using "single" for the first 2 tracks and bouncing.

When I played the file in windows media, the song finished and kept on going silent for like 10 minutes.

I exported the 2 tracks into a a session with only those 2 tracks, then bounced and it worked. Now my file is less than 3 MB