Sound quality issue

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

I’m using OSX 10.9.5, and just upgraded to Audacity 2.1.3

I have versions of the same song in Audacity (one with background vocals, and one without background vocals). When each song is played individually, they sound great…however when they are played at the same time, it is like someone shut the bass of completely. Any thought or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, prior to upgrading to 2.1.3, when I tried to combine the two songs, it was apparent the volume was not combined, and the sound was terrible. Of the years with Audacity I’ve never run into these issues.

2

Quick update…even with 2.1.3, I’m still not getting a quality song (volume not combined, and bad sound quality) when merging/combing the two songs. HELP!!!

3

These are both MP3 downloads, right?

Try importing both songs, select one by clicking just above MUTE, and Effect > Invert.

Even if it doesn’t help, we’d be interested what happens.

And also, why would you want this? The question stopped just short of writing the goal.

“I need this to work so I can …” do what?

Koz

4

If the original producer got one version from the other through trickery and fancy software, combining them is never going to round right. That process is not reversible.

Which brings us back to…why do you need this?

Koz

5

As to the “why” of doing this…on some of the tracks with background vocals, just seem to over power the accompaniment, so by loading, one track w/o background vocals, and a second track with background vocals, I’m able to lower the bgv in one track and in that same section of the accp track, raise the volume to compensate.

I’ve done this many many times, and have never had a problem with mixing types of files (mp3, wav, and aiff), however after this situation, I went back and used only mp3 files for each track and everything worked fine. I’ll experiment with mixed files later.