sound file conversion

I have a lot of music files in .wav format and would like to convert them to .wma format. Am I right being under the impression they would be smaller and I could fit more on a standard CD. I know I could convert to MP3 but then I could not play them on a cd player.

 

You have a player that plays .wma?

 

When I used Roxio to copy A CD to my HD, they were saved in wma so i thought that the .wma was the native format on the CD. Was I wrong?

I want to shrink the 60+ meg .wav files to be able to put enough of them on a CD to be the same as a commercial CD.

 

An audio CD, playable in all basic music CD players, has it's files in .wav format, although "disguised" as CDA (CDAudio). The only way to shrink the files to fit more on a CD, is to reduce the bitrate. Bitrate is directly linked to quality and filesize. Higher is better is bigger.
Windows might report the files to be .wma, but that's just windows screwup.
If you opened each .wav in an audio editing app, such as Goldwave or Soundforge, you can resample the files at a lower bitrate, then resave. For CD quality, I don't suggest going lower than 192kbps, although some are excellent as low as 128. Below that is stereo radio quality or worse.
You could also rip the files to mp3 using CDEX, adjust the bitrate (I think Nero Soundtrax might do it as well), then let Roxio recreate the proper (.wav/.cda) format to write the CD.

 

Thanks Will try your suggestions.

 

Great!! I downloaded the shareware Goldwave and it did just what I wanted. I wanted to create some CDs for the car from 1960s music files downloaded from Napster (legal). Each file was from about 30M to 100 M and putting them on CDs could be very wasteful. This is going to a standard auto music system not some great hi-fidelity home entertainment unit.

Just as a test, I reduced one from 20 to 10 and the file from 47meg to 20. Sounded fine on my small computer Jensens and should be good in the car as well. I may even get it smaller but must play with them some.

Thanks again. Never would have thought to look for something like that.

My usage of the shareware version will not exceed what I want.

 

Excellent! Thanks for letting us know what worked.