Audacity Forum

For uncompressed file types such as WAV, each audio sample is saved and occupies the same amount of disk space as every other sample. Thus a 2 channel recording with audio in the left channel and silence in the right channel will be double the size of a mono file because the silent channel has exact...

you should also be able to go straight to an unattended export in the same way Chains export automatically if there is such a command. That sounds like it might be a reasonable enhancement in some cases, but wouldn't you normally set TR to start a bit early and end a bit late just to be sure that t...

As koz says - your recording are mono, so best to work in mono throughout. Also best to keep the "Quality" setting as 32 bit float. When exporting to 24 bit, the recording will be "perfect" down to about -120 dB (even "state of the art" 24 bit DACs produce only random n...

Ouch, that looks bad.
Are you recording from a USB device?

A note on "flexibility".
If you are ever likely to be recording just two people, it would probably be better to use a couple of tie-clip mics. Do either of those devices allow external mics (or an external "line level" device, such as a mixer) to be plugged in?

a Rode video mic That's not really the right sort of mic for using close up. A "large diaphragm condenser" mic is what I'd go for, but if you only have one mic available, then give it a go and see what you can get. If you are not in a studio there will probably be enough (or too much) nat...

MP3 is a "lossy" format, so there is always some loss of sound quality when encoding to MP3. The default WAV format is a "lossless" format, so the exported file is virtually identical to the audio in Audacity. For "absolutely perfect", "32 bit float WAV" is be...

in audacity i see no LIBRARIES option in edit>preferences. I'm not on Ubuntu, but I think they disable "dynamic loading", so LAME is automatically loaded (if installed) and there is no "Libraries" tab in Preferences. on the wiki it says that ubuntu before 11.4 didn't show librar...

Silma wrote:using a silent keyboard is not an option, even if this would be the nobrainer solution

As you say, that is the obvious solution, and I can't think of any other practical solution. Why is it "not an option"?

Preferences are stored in the audacity.cfg file.
The default sample rate, sample format and number of recording channels can be set in preferences.
See: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/de ... ences.html
and http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/qu ... ences.html