On Tue, 2009-12-22 at 15:39 -0800, AndrewRT wrote:
Thanks for the tip - I'll give it a go
<snip>
Try Audacity for the conversion.
Load up MP3, if needed do noise removal, compress to peaks, export as OGG and fill in the metadata.
Noise removal is the slightly confusing one. What you want to do is select a second or two of quiet/background noise in the recording; pick the noise removal option from the menu; click the "sample" button to build a noise profile; then pick from menu again and apply the noise profile to the full recording.
Never had a file done that way fail to upload. Plus Audacity is Free software.
The folks that do Wikivoices (featuring myself, Mike Peel, Skenmy, and Jimmy Wales on Wikinews this evening 8pm) have a lot of experience cleaning up and editing recordings. Once you've done a couple of clean and uploads they can probably offer some really good advanced tips.