Hello, this is my first post to the forum. I have been using Audacity to record a story using my microphone for vocals as well as importing sound effects and music. I noticed that exporting to WAV results in a significant loss in quality. To try and get better quality I exported to a 24 bit flac and then recoded it to a WAV with the flac codec tool. I noticed the file almost doubled in size but I didn’t notice a significant improvement in quality. When I play it in WINAMP it says it is 2117 kbps versus the 1411 kbps when I originally exported to WAV. In the end I am going to burn these to CD. WIll the improvement in kbps make a difference on the CD or am I wasting my time?
Check the settings in your media player.
“WAV” format is “lossless”, so the difference between 16 bit WAV format and the audio in Audacity is minute (less than -80 dB rms).
Some players have “enhancements” and effects that may be enabled by default and may make the sound much worse than it really is.
Audio CD format is 16 bit, 44100 Hz PCM stereo (the same as the default WAV export from Audacity).