Audacity Forum

When you open a stereo file you should see two waveforms (left on the top and & right on the bottom). If you only see one wave the original MP3 is mono. A true-mono file will play out of both speakers. Or, it's possible to have a stereo file with silence on one side. In that case, you'll get one wav...

I'd guess they aren't really MP3. Or maybe they are corrupt. Audio compression is a lot like encryption and if it's not decoded/decompressed correctly you get garbage (noise). Can you play the files in Windows Media Player (or whatever you normally use to play files)? What version of Audacity are y...

You have to give it a file name just like if you create/save a Word or Excel file. (I think it defaults to "untitled".)

But, do you see something like this?

I split the stereo to mono and now I can only hear sounds made into my mic on the left side of my earphones. That's very strange.... Normally, the little pan-sliders to the left of the waveform get centered and then everything comes-out of both speakers. And then with the default settings it should...

Audacity doesn't keep track of the original format (except it will match the Project Rate/sample rate to the 1st file you open). So you have to choose the bit depth when you export no matter what. It's perfectly OK to share 24-bit files but you should let Audacity to work at 32-bits internally. And ...

And, if the preferences in Audacity are set to a default of 32-bit, both 16-bit and 24-bit files are converted to 32-bit. This is the normal default for internal processing. (The conversion to 32-bit and back is lossless.) It's actually more important that it's 32-bit floating-point which essential...

Running a school radio program with it. What does that mean? What are you recording? From the microphone built into your laptop? From a USB mic or USB interface? Etc? ...Sometimes you can get an echo if Software Playthrough is enabled but sometimes simply turning it off isn't the best fix.

Audacity is free and open source and there is no official trial version. I recommend uninstalling what you have and then download & install the legitimate version linked from https://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/ (It takes you to fosshub.com for the actual download.) ...It's probably a good...

Any modern computer is powerful enough for basic mono or stereo recording. But it can get complicated... The problem is usually multitasking. (The operating system is always multitasking even when you're running only one application.) Some other application, driver, or background process just has to...

If you go over 0dB things can sometimes be unpredictable... If you want predictable-repeatable results, here's what I suggest: Export as regular WAV first (not floating-point WAV). That will give you hard clipping at exactly 0dB. That may sound different than it sounds in Audacity If you're not play...