atari2600land's Blog

At uncompressed CD quality which is 44.1KHz/16-bit stereo, 8.5gb (which would be a dual-layer DVD) is about 14 hours of PCM audio. If you use DVD-Audio lossless compression you should be able to increase that by 40-50%. If you're able to use AC3 compression (standard DVD-Video compression) at a decent 192kbps, you can get upward of 90 hours on there, though I don't know if you have to include a dummy video track which would eat some space.

 

I don't think either DVD format, video or audio, will handle 32-bit float audio data or 8KHz audio. That's some high-resolution sampling for rather low-quality audio (highest frequency that can be represented is 4KHz). You'll probably have to convert to a different format before making a DVD, regardless of which codec you use.

 

If you're using Audacity, I assume you're working in stereo or mono and not, say, 5.1 surround sound, which would take much more space.

 

(I used to make CDs with 20 hours of heavily compressed FM-quality music for my car stereo all the time, so I've thought a lot about this stuff.)

 

Well, I don't know how to change the sampling rates with Audacity. So I could get about a 14-hour long song on one DVD? I'm using Audacity, and so far the song only has two tracks, both I think are mono but they could be stereo. One track is the main song and the other track is extra noises and stuff.

To change the sampling rate in Audacity you just choose Tracks, Resample from the menu, and enter a number. But don't do that unless it turns out you have to, because you'll lose quality if the new number is lower, or use more disk space for no better quality if it's higher.

 

Audacity will also convert mono to stereo (you can even add a little artificial separation to simulate real stereo) and overlay tracks. I can't say I've ever done a 14 hour project in it, so you may run into its limitations, whatever they may be, but I've done 2-3 hour projects with it and things were still smooth.