I have noticed my WAVE files I am creating with Audacity are rather large. The one thing that seems unusual in my properties summary is that the bit rate on the files is 1411kbps. I compare that to a ripped track from a CD and those are 192 which would certainly account for an Audacity WAVE song being around 30,000 KB and a ripped song from CD being around 6,000. Is there something simple that I am missing in the “Audacity Preferences” that I just am not seeing? Also the Audio Format in the property summary is a “PCM”. My “uncompressed export format” is set to “16bit PCM” so obviously that’s what I’m telling the files to be. I have no idea what that means and if it’s okay or needs to be changed in someway to make these files smaller (more like a ripped CD track at 1/5 the size). Please help.
Uncompressed CD quality audio is around 10MB per minute. (Around 600MB for a 1 hour CD).
In Audacity 1.3.x the default bit depth is better than CD quality - set at 32 bit. That means that each sample value is stored as a 32 bit number (extremely accurate and ideal for digital processing) whereas CD audio is 16 bit (adequate for high quality reproduction).
To Export in CD quality using Audacity 1.3.x, make sure that the “Project Sample Rate” is set to 44100 before you export (box in lower left of the main Audacity screen) then choose “WAV (Microsoft) Signed 16 bit PCM” as the Export format.