COnvert to A-Law CCITT... :-/

[Thomas C. Gass]

I've recorded some answering machine prompts for a friend of mine and had to deliver them as A-Law ccitt, 8kHz, 8bit wav files. I've done the conversion in Audition 3 and, well, it works, but it sounds awful... Is there any trick in doing good A-Law conversions?
Thanks for any hints,

Thomas

[Paul Plack]

Thomas,

Audition can't do 8-bit, low-rate recordings as well as the specialized codecs built into the telephone systems. Anything recorded at 8-bit in Audition will have a best-case noise floor of about -48 dB, so you'll always hear that "bacon frying." You can improve some of the "lisping" artifacts by pre-filtering to lop off the high end.

As a test, send him 22050/16-bit .wav files, and see if they'll load. Some phone systems swallow them happily, even if they don't officially claim to support them. They will take more memory/storage, but your friend's system may have enough.