Audacity will play a recording made with Audio Hijack perfectly, but when I try to split the file into separate tracks, they emerge with serious hiss.
I have tried splitting with cut and paste and with labels.
Audacity has been reinstalled.
I have downloaded OceanAudio and managed to split my file but OA is a lot more difficult to use.
Weird!
What is the format and are you saving to the same format?
And thatās the only thing you are doing? Splitting with no adjustments or effects?
The only things I can think of areā¦ if you export as 8-bits youāll get quantization noise which is like a āfuzzā on top the audio.
Or dither which is intentional noise thatās supposed to sound better than quantization noise.
You shouldnāt hear either one at 16-bits or better.
Quantization goes-away with pure-digital silence whereas dither is constant.
Thank you for taking the trouble to reply.
The technical stuff is beyond me. I use Audacity on default settings. The only effect I use is fade out but didnāt do so in this case. The music is a symphony which I wanted to divide into movements.
I used AIFF on a Mac. I record on Audio Highjack and drag the file to Audacity which I use to ātop and tailā and to divide into tracks ready to burn a cd. I have been doing this for years with no problems.
Presumably my success with other software indicates that the fault must be with Audacity.
Still, VERY unusualā¦ AIFF at 16-bits or better should be OK. And without dither the audio data shouldnāt be getting changed at all (except for the parts cut-out). But like I said, you canāt normally hear dither eitherā¦
and to divide into tracks ready to burn a cd.
This probably isnāt necessary with most classical music as long as there are gaps/silence between movements, but there is a way with a cue sheet to burn a CD from āone big fileā and the cue sheet tells the burning software where to put the track markers. It works well with live rock concerts where there is continuous applause/audience noise between songs. Iāve used the same method with crossfaded mix CDs.
Iām on Windows and I donāt know what Mac burning software supports cue sheets. But you can make a cue sheet with a plain text editor. I usually start with a known good example and edit it.
Does this mean you have recorded a stream ie what was playing on your computer while it was playing? I know nothing about Mac software. If so, what site were you playing from?
Itās Ocenaudio. I use it for recording mainly because I find that part easier than Audacity. I do find Audacity ābetterā for editing. How did you find out how to split files with Ocenaudio?
Are you willing to share your project file so I can try what you did and see what happens for me?
Mark B
Hello
Thank you for replying.
Pirate
The intrigue increases. 
Lots of stuff on BBC Sounds can be downloaded directly but it can be either MP3 or m4a, neither of which might suit you. If there is one, could you post a link to the symphony and let me delve into it a bit more, please?
Are you also in the UK then?
Mark B
I hope that I am writing in the right place.
As I said, I canāt cope with the technical stuff. However, I have done some experimenting:
Firstly I copied a small section of the symphony again from the BBC site, opened in Audacity and divided the result with ālabelsā. Result: Hiss.
Next I went to the same radio programme, only a week later, and recorded and split as before. Result: no hiss.
All the recordings, splittings and exportings were done in exactly the same way, with no adjustments to the settings on AudioHijack or Audacity.
It is all a mystery! Thanks to those who tried to help. I think Iāll leave it there.
Pirate