Digital/compressed music tech question. Help, please?

[UCLA02]

I'm trying to rip spoken word/"books on tape"-type stuff onto my iPod, but want to keep it the smallest file size possible, to get the most on there (only 2GB Nano) yet listenable at a reasonable volume. Assuming I'm sticking with the standard 44.1 sample rate, how low a bit rate can I go and still remain listenable? I would think that it would be OK to go lower on spoken word stuff rather than music, but that's just my guess.

I currently have all my stuff at 128, but would like to go to 96 or lower, if practicable.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

THANKS!

[TheBaldyMan]

1. 16 bit mono at 44.1kHz is hifi for the spoken word

you might even go down to 20k bandwidth and it would still sound ok.

If you have a short sample of speech you could try several different compression ratios then listen back to hear if there is an unacceptable loss of audio quality. The minimum bandwidth you find acceptable gives the compression you use.

[UCLA02]

2. THANKS!!

That'll save me a lot of space.

(Got a 2 Gb Nano and what I wanted to put on there at 128 rate is 2.07Gb. So close, yet so far.)

Thanks again!