Hello, I’m trying to modify an existing wav file to 11.025 - 99.000 kHz 16-bit mono, to conform with Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Can this be done with audacity?
Yes, but Audacity is somewhat buggy in this regard. I’ll recommend a better solution at the bottom.
The method is as follows:
-
Import your wav file.
-
In the bottom left corner of Audacity’s main screen, change the project sample rate to the target rate (as long as you imported into an empty project, this will have changed to reflect the current sample rate of the file).
-
Now you can export the clip to a new filename (you can’t write over wav files while working with them) and it will be at the sample rate you asked for.
But this is where the bug rears it’s ugly head. If converting from a low sample rate to a higher sample rate (e.g. 8KHz → 44.1KHz) Audacity will erroneously add a small amount of silence to the beginning of the track. If converting from high to low, Audacity will erroneously add a larger amount of silence to the end of the track.
That said, I have to recommend a freeware (Windows only) piece of software called r8brain. If you put all the files you want to change in one folder, you can use the batch process function of this program to convert all your files at once. This program also doesn’t suffer from Audacity’s rate conversion bug. Just make sure you don’t set it to overwrite your files while it’s working, if it crashes you might lose data.