I did a simple cut to remove a silent moment from two tracks and when I played the audio the quality had changed to sound like the audio recording was done over a poor connection on a long distance call.
Has anyone encountered this before?
The Audacity log says:
10:58:30: Audacity 3.1.3
10:58:30: sqlite3 message: (1) no such table: project in “SELECT 1 FROM project LIMIT 1;”
10:58:31: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-58.dll’ (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Failed to load avformat-58.dll (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Failed to load shared library ‘avformat-57.dll’ (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Failed to load avformat-57.dll (error 126: The specified module could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Couldn’t find symbol ‘avio_context_free’ in a dynamic library (error 127: The specified procedure could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Couldn’t find symbol ‘av_packet_alloc’ in a dynamic library (error 127: The specified procedure could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Couldn’t find symbol ‘av_packet_free’ in a dynamic library (error 127: The specified procedure could not be found.)
10:58:31: Error: Couldn’t find symbol ‘avcodec_free_context’ in a dynamic library (error 127: The specified procedure could not be found.)
10:59:00: Loaded 71 string 1.490234 Kb in size
10:59:00: Project loaded in 298 ms
All of those “avformat” errors aren’t really errors. It just means you don’t have the optional [u]FFmpeg Import/Export Library[/u] installed. I don’t know what the other messages mean…
I did a simple cut to remove a silent moment from two tracks and when I played the audio the quality had changed to sound like the audio recording was done over a poor connection on a long distance call.
Does this happen when you play the audio while still in Audacity, or after you export the file?
If it happens after exporting, what format are you using? (If you are exporting to a lossy-compression format, such as MP3, check the quality or bitrate settings.)
It affected the audio quality in the Audacity timeline. (It also exported with the same results.)
I also tried to Undo the cut I had just made, but it didn’t revert the audio to it’s original quality.
General
Complete name : CD - 199 - Rough - Bad Q-01.wav
Format : Wave
File size : 10.6 MiB
Duration : 11 min 37 s
Overall bit rate mode : Constant
Overall bit rate : 128 kb/s
Track name : Audio Track
Track name/Position : 1
ITRK : 1
Audio
Format : PCM
Format settings : Little / Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 11 min 37 s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 kb/s
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 8 000 Hz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 10.6 MiB (100%)
It affected the audio quality in the Audacity timeline. (It also exported with the same results.)
Well… That’s just weird and I don’t know what’s going-on…
Sampling rate : 8 000 Hz
Bit depth : 16 bits
A sample rate of 8Khz means the audio is limited to 4kHz and the highs will be filtered-out. A voice recording will loose some the “T” and “S” sounds detail, but I assume you didn’t change the project rate so that should be the same as the original.
16-bits is fine. (As you may know, regular audio CDs are 16-bits at 44,100Hz.)
My guess is that the “simple cut” is a red herring, and that “somehow” you accidentally changed the “Project Rate” (lower left corner of the main Audacity window to 8000 (from a higher value, such as 44100. That would explain exactly the symptoms that you describe.
