A lot of church sites want to put their sermons on the web. They record their sermons to mp3 and upload them to their site. Unfortunately a sermon can take up 50 meg or more. It does not take long to use up your web hosting quota that way.
To solve this problem, use Lame, which can easily be installed in most linux distributuions. On ubuntu, use
apt-get install lame
Once installed, if your original (large) sound file is sermon.mp3, you would want to do the following command:
lame --abr 16 -q 0 -m m sermon.mp3 sermon_compressed.mp3
You will find that the sermon_compressed.mp3 file that is generated is much smaller than the original. I saw a reduction in size from 49 meg to 7 meg for at 40 minute mp3 speech file.