If you’re not too picky about the compression artifacts, it can actually help.
I’m picky about any artifacts that can be heard. I won’t know if what-ever-this-is adds noticeable artifacts until I can get it to stop. I know something is messing with lower frequencies, but I think that’s a separate combination of factors (not solvable here). But if this thing is inadvertently skewing the equalization, it could be exaggerating that issue. I’m also getting some reverb in lower-mids that I think are sympathetic vibrations in the recording space, but those could conceivably be a type of artifact. I don’t know if chasing down this anomaly is going to make either of these problems better or not. The only way to find that out is to record without it and hear the difference.
As an aside, I’ve listened to plenty of podcasts with terrible compression artifacts, and no, those aren’t welcome in any of my current projects (or my foreseeable ones).
I do care about loss of quality. I could crank the mic down to 25% and never get any clipping (even if I yelled), but I’d effectively be chucking 2 bits off a 16 bit signal. Going the other direction, upping the mic level, and clipping is definitely an artifact to be avoided.
Are you reading for AudioBooks? There’s a whole ACX protocol and test process for that. You are expected to read several dB lower than delivery volume. Nobody reads straight into an Audio Book chapter.
Among other things. And yes, I’m aware that the mic will be quiet (hypothetically), and will need editing, normalization, and compression, etc (and that converting to 32-bit before processing may cause less signal loss during transformations, etc). But I need to get the actual data coming from the actual mic into Audacity cleanly. Then I can futz around with production. I don’t want data lost before I even begin, and I don’t trust random anonymous algorithms not to do stupid stuff. This is akin to recording using a mixer board that has developed… personality. The raw take should be as clean as reasonably possible.
Please note that Audacity 2.1.3 is available. It solved a number of 2.1.2 problems.
If I must, I will. I’ve got a number of customized settings that work with customized macros. An in-place upgrade would probably go smoothly, but it could be a royal pain to debug.
I don’t think this is an Audacity bug to be fixed, but I was thinking that maybe there was a setting somewhere that could be used as a work-around and/or that someone here may have dealt with similar problems before. As such I really don’t expect that upgrading will make this go away. (I glanced through the release notes, all the same, but I don’t see it.)