compressing a recording

can anyone tell me how the compress a recording from the mpc into the computer. i use sound forge to record my beat from the mpc, if the beat is like 2 1/2 minutes the file might be like 15mb. if i turn the wav. file to mp3 it should compress the file right?? how can i do this??

thanks in advance

i use winamp as an mp3 player on my pc. at www.winamp.com you can find a mp3 encoder plugin for it (chun yui's or something). i find it really easy to do and really easy to batch encode stuff with.