Export to mp3, bit rate options

Greetings,
I’ve been using Audacity for a while. On both Win95 OSR2.0 and WinXP, I’ve used it to edit audio and export mp3’s via the Lame dll. It worked great.

I have a new computer with Win10 and installed Audacity 3.7.7. I find that the built-in mp3 options are highly limited in the available bit rate choices. For example, I often edit speech only podcasts. The original files have a bit rate of 137 kb/s. I down-sample them to 56 kb/s in order to conserve storage space. The resulting file still sounds OK. I also use a voice recorder and save these at even lower bit rates.

Audacity 3.7.7’s built-in mp3 options can’t do that so I installed FFmpeg. Not only does it have far too many options for me, but the mp3 bit rate settings aren’t working. When I try to export my 137 kb/s podcast at 56 kb/s (56000 b/s), the resulting file is still encoded at 137 kb/s.

I now have the following questions.

• Is there a way to add additional bit rate options to the built-in mp3 export?

• Can I set Audacity 3.7.7 to use the Lame dll?

Note, I tried swapping in an old dll and renaming it to the 3.7.7 version’s lame dll name, but that didn’t work.

• If that won’t work, how do I get FFmpeg to export at the bit rate I set in its export options?

• What other mp3 export add-ons I can use besides FFmpeg?

Thank you.

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You can select between a big choice of mp3 sampling rates in the export dialog if you select “constant bit rate”. 137 kb/s sounds like “variable bit rate” setting.

No, mp3 export format is now built into Audacity.

The built-in mp3 export option is no longer available. I uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled Audacity 3.7.7. The built-in mp3 export option is still unavailable. I have the mp2 and FFmpeg export options (among others). How do I fix this?

Thank you.

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Thank you. The mp3 module is now working. I have uninstalled FFmpeg.

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