distortion / noise in EVERY wave-file after export

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I’m new here, so, hi everyone :slight_smile: I really appreciate your work on this project <3

I was a casual Audacity-user until i notices a big issue a year ago. I thought this will be fixed anytime soon, but unfortunately it doesn’t. And I couldn’t find any discussions/information about it, so I decided to ask for some opinions here what could be the cause for that.

https://youtu.be/2pMUguktCEM

As you can see in the video, I created a new project, added 3 seconds of silence and exported it into common wav-format. After that I analyzed the audio-spectrum of the file and as you can see, there are “signals” at the higher frequency’s. I reproduced this with stable and beta-builds (2.2.0-beta-Sep 26 2017 & some earlier versions), on LMDE, Ubuntu Gnome & Windows 10 (Fall Creators Update & some earlier versions). I tried several configurations, like different sample rates, yada yada yada. Always the same result, no matter what kind of source or audio-settings I use.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance!
test.wav.png

2

Is that the dither signal? Audacity has to add a dither signal so the conversion from 32 floating to 16 bit doesn’t create audible errors.

Most people can’t hear very much that high and it’s a very low level.

You can turn it off in preferences.

Koz

3

It was indeed the dither signal! I had the idea that it could be caused by something like this but it made no sense to me that it would also be applied (in this way) on a silent audio track.
Thanks koz, you made my day :slight_smile: I was struggling with this behavior for a year now and avoided Audacity as much I can (although I love it). It was so simple … kinda embarrassing :mrgreen: