I’m a DJ just making the transition to digital. I have a killer record collection that I want to digitize. I just purchased the Serato SSL 3 which records vinyl into 24-bit. I recorded a song and brought it into Audacity to take some clicks and pops out and to break up the tracks as I recorded an entire side of an LP. When I tried to export it, I noticed that Audacity only offers 16-bit PCM. Am I using an old version of Audacity that cannot export 24-bit or is this the highest offered when exporting a PCM file.
Which computer which operating system and which Audacity?
Koz
Are you on a mac? If so, there was a bug in some versions of Audacity so that only 16-bit files could be exported with ‘export multiple’.
It’s fixed in the latest version (1.3.7).
Anyway, the way to export 24-bit files is to choose ‘other uncompressed files’ as export format (file → export, or file → export multiple), click into options and choose ‘wav (microsoft)’ for header and ‘signed 24 bit pcm’ for encoding.
Also take care that your track is imported as 32bit - float and not 16bit, otherwise the quality would be lost.
Thanks for the response. I think I must have an old version. I’m on a PC running Windows XP. I will go through your suggested steps. I just didn’t see the option for 24-bit in the drop down menu. Also I will make sure to download the latest version of Audacity. Thanks again.
On more thing. Can someone walk me through the steps to TAG a .wav file? Is there a way to get the bpm of a newly converted vinyl to digital file?
Standard WAV files do not support tags. There are variations on the WAV format (such as BWF) but these are not fully supported by Audacity.
Please explain.
Thank you. I was able to export 24-bit file. What I was referring to is “Can Audacity calculate the bpm of a new vinyl recording?” Also before I exported a dialog box popped up where I keyed in title, artist, year, label… but after I exported and dragged the file into Serato Scratch Live, I noticed that the information wasn’t there. Any ideas why that happened? The file was named before importing into Audacity but the artist, year, etc. wasn’t until dialog box popped up before exporting out of Audacity.
No, there is no automatic way in Audacity to do that.
That dialogue is called the “Metatag Editor”. It is for entering, or editing the metatag data for file types that support metatag (id2/id3) data.
The WAV file format does not support metatag data, so that dialogue is redundant (does nothing) when exporting WAV files.
MP3, Ogg, and flac support metatag data, although the “standard” is not very standard and some applications support different fields to other applications.
Personally I wish that the metatag editor did not pop up by default, but it seems that others disagree with me on that one. You can change the default behaviour so that the metatag editor does not pop up every time in Audacity’s Preferences (Edit > Preferences > Import/Export tab). The Metatag editor may be called up manually at any time from the File menu.