How can I get the best quality sound?

Hello,

I am a hardcore musician and I extremely enjoy recording myself. I play the clarinet and I have a whole lot of music that a like to record myself playing. This music often has 2-5 different parts that I record over top each other. I don’t have the best quality mic, it’s just a microphone on a set of headphones. (I should be able to upgrade as my dad, who is a tech guy, just ordered a high quality mic from Hong Kong.) I don’t know a whole lot about Audacity so I would like some advice.

The feature I like to use is the pan feature at the side of the recording. I like to put different parts a certain percentage to the right or left to make it sound more awesome, and make a little bit of distinction between the parts. It’s a really cool feature.

Recently I have been experiencing a problem. The recording sounds pretty great in Audacity, but when I export it as an mp3 it has bad quality. It also sounds fine if I export it as a WAV file. But I want to know how to fix mp3 problem. It didn’t do that before.

I would like to make a CD (not get it produced or anything) but just make a few copies and send them to my friends and family as gifts. I have done this before, but I was wondering maybe I could get someone’s advice on how to make it the best by using Audacity.

I don’t know anything about any settings on my Audacity program. It would be very much appreciated if someone could tell me how to get the best possible out of my recordings. I would be so grateful! If you need any more information about my program, I would gladly find it out so you can help me better. Maybe I could even post a sample of my music.

Thanks a bunch, :smiley:


Hardcore Musician

You don’t have to post anything.

I would not be going through MP3 in order to make a Music CD. Most if not all Music CD Authoring programs are perfectly happy and in fact greatly prefer WAV files. Music on a CD is in sorta WAV format anyway in 44100, 16-bit, Stereo and if you change Audacity preferences to that, it will produce music files in the same format as the CD.

MP3 always creates damage to the sound and you can’t stop it. The amount of damage goes up as the filesize and bitrate goes down. You can set the damage with the bitrate number in Preferences in Audacity 1.2, and in the Export step in Audacity 1.3.

Minimums are 32 for a mono show 64 for a stereo show and beyond 300, most people can’t tell any damage – but it’s still there.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/WAV-MP3.wav

Koz