Hi all, first post here. Firstly thank you for making such a great program!
I am totally blind and use the nvda screan reader. I had an ancient audacity build with asio for years, but now that there’s an nvda addon I thought I’d upgrade.
After upgrading asio vanished. I did however manage to get it to work with help from a third party solution.
My questions are as follows
I used to export as other uncompressed files, then select 24bit wav. When I do this now I get wavex or wave that doesn’t say microsoft. I tried both of these and while they do export they won’t open in my restoration software.
However, now that there is an option to export as 24 bit wave directly, I’m wondering if this has replaced entirely the other uncompressed option?
File properties in windows say my files are 24 bit 96khz, how can I double check they’re saving correctly? it’s important to me as I restore thousands of 78s and 24bit is a must with such old recordings.
I could upload a wave file for someone sighted to look at if it would help.
Thanks!
Rob
(Select) Save as type: WAV (Microsoft) - That might be the default. It’s the default for me, but it might be remembering the last setting.
(Select) Encoding: Signed 24-bit PCM
it’s important to me as I restore thousands of 78s and 24bit is a must with such old recordings.
Well… I don’t want to go off-topic and get into an argument but the guys who do scientific level- matched blind ABX listening tests will tell you that 16/44.1 is better than human hearing and you can’t hear a difference between a high-resolution original and a copy downsampled to “CD quality”.
Even with “more modern” vinyl LPs, digital CD quality is obviously better than the analog original so you can accurately capture the analog sound. Some people claim that analog has “infinite resolution” but the resolution is limited by the noise. And with digital, the frequency response is dead-flat (within the Nyquist and smoothing filter limits) whereas the frequency response of records varies with the playback and recoding equipment. (You can actually get higher frequencies with vinyl but CDs are flatter within the audible range.)
That said, 24/96 is the “pro studio standard” and the ONLY downside is larger files. If you’ve got a 24-bit soundcard/interface you might as well use it!
P.S.
The main advantage with ASIO is low latency. That’s ONLY important if you are monitoring yourself while recording and the delay makes it hard to perform. And, sometimes Windows messes with the sound (to 'enhance" communications) and you have to make sure all of that is turned-off for high-quality recording. And, Windows will “secretly resample” so you can record at 24/96 or higher with any-old cheap soundcard and you might not know the true resolution. With ASIO drivers that doesn’t happen.
Oh don’t worry, no argument from me about being able to hear 24bit especially with 78s, but it really helps when restoring them declicking etc, and this I know from experience to be true. When I started out I had this great thing called an IKey, Gemini made it I think, if they ever did a 24bit version I’d not be using audacity! but since I started using 24bit recording my restorations have improved.
What you just described in the save as dialog is exactly what I am doing. I’m just worried that, as you said, windows might mess with it, and therefore I won’t be getting true 24 bit 96khz recording, that’s what I’m trying to find out, weather it’s “bit perfect” or not.
I also wonder if the old way of doing it aka save as other uncompressed file and this new way are exactly the same.
that’s what I’m trying to find out, weather it’s “bit perfect” or not.
I also wonder if the old way of doing it aka save as other uncompressed file and this new way are exactly the same.
Yes, it should be “bit perfect” unless you have dither enabled. But again, dither is one of those things I don’t worry about… Especially with anything from analog. Dither is noise (that you can’t hear at 16-bits or better) and the analog noise drowns-out the dither noise.
Audacity works internally at 32-bit floating-point so the 24-bit file can’t be a bit-perfect copy of that but it will be identical to any other 24-bit export and if you don’t do any editing/processing/level adjustments (unlikely) it will be bit-identical to what your analog-to-digital converter sent to Audacity. The conversion to 32-bit floating-point and back is lossless.
As you probably know, that’s not related to ASIO. ASIO is only for analog-to-digital (recording) and digital-to-analog (playback).