Exporting audio

[rochestra]

Hello, this is my first post to the forum. I have been using Audacity to record a story using my microphone for vocals as well as importing sound effects and music. I noticed that exporting to WAV results in a significant loss in quality. To try and get better quality I exported to a 24 bit flac and then recoded it to a WAV with the flac codec tool. I noticed the file almost doubled in size but I didn't notice a significant improvement in quality. When I play it in WINAMP it says it is 2117 kbps versus the 1411 kbps when I originally exported to WAV. In the end I am going to burn these to CD. WIll the improvement in kbps make a difference on the CD or am I wasting my time?

[kozikowski]

Something's wrong. Exporting at Audacity default is Music CD quality. There is no "significant loss in quality."

Can you put the damage into words? Dense and buzzy? Crackling?

Post a bit of the damage here on the forum.

viewtopic.php?f=49&t=64936

Koz

[rochestra]

Hi Koz,

Thanks for replying. I wouldn't call it dense, buzzy, or crackly. I guess it's just me being picky. I just noticed that when I played the original project in the timeline, it seems to have more depth and space. When I exported it to WAV it seemed to lose some of that. I included a short 6 second WAV sample. I hope this is enough to help. I am using WIndows Vista.

I really love Audacity though. I used to use my old Vesta Fire 4-track recorder back in the old days for my projects.

Thanks again.

[steve]

I noticed that exporting to WAV results in a significant loss in quality.

How were you playing the WAV files?

[rochestra]

I listened through WINAMP and also in my car stereo after I burned it on a CD.

[steve]

Try importing the WAV file back into Audacity and play it there. It should sound identical to the project that you exported from. If it doesn't then there could be something wrong. If you import the file into the same project then you can do a direct comparison of the exported version against the original version by using the track solo and mute buttons.

[rochestra]

I did exactly as you said and it does sound identical. Audacity is that good! So my car speakers were lying to me and WINMAC isn't giving me a faithful reproduction. Thanks for the help.

[rochestra]

I just discovered why it was sounding bad on the burned CD's. During the burn process I clicked the "normalize all audio files" box. I stopped doing this and the burned CD's sound awesome now. I am burning my projects along with other music files. I think it was making my files louder to normalize them with the other files which made them sound bad.