Hello everyone, I have noticed (with bit per bit comparison) that if I open a wave file, cut the very end, and export it with presumably the same imput settings, apparently the whole audio files gets altered and all the bits gets scrambled. I would expect the file not to change in any way, except for the part that I cut, since wave files are uncompressed. How can I figure out what is going on? Maybe I’m importing the file with wrong settings? This is not a big deal because the audio quality seems not to be affected, however I’m concerned that I’m not doing the right process while importing and exporting audio files. Thanks for your help!
As you say, exporting as 16-bit WAV format is not “bit perfect”, but the difference in terms of sound quality is negligible. This behaviour is normal for Audacity.
The reason that it happens is because Audacity works in 32-bit float format, which is a more precise format than “normal” (16-bit) WAV format, so when you export in 16-bit WAV the data is being converted down to a lower bit-depth than Audacity’s internal format. When the digital audio is converted to a lower bit-depth, “dither” is applied to avoid “quantize” errors. There is more information about “dither” here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Dither
Thank you very much, this answered my question. Cheers!