Audacity 2.3.3
Windows 10 version 1903
Hello!
How do I export .wav file in decible scale? All files keep exporting as linear scale from +1 to -1 but I would like it in dB scale. I cannot seem to find an answer for this. Is it possible?
Thank you
The default display is in percent. 1 = 100%. That lets you see the loudest 25dB of the show which is usually most important. If you really want to see the dB scale, you can do that with the drop-down menu on the left > Waveform (dB).
It won’t change the show at all. You’re just looking at it differently. You may find that suddenly viewing all 96dB of the show doesn’t tell you a whole lot, particularly since the important bits are now smashed up in a really tiny portion of the wave.
For example, this is the display of a sound file that is clean and easily passes audiobook standards. It looks dreadful because you have all that “grass” on the left-hand side. But the grass (noise) is at -70dB compared to the show up at about -15dB. Nobody can hear that difference.
Other audio programs display the waves in percent, but label them in dB, so you can directly compare them with the bouncing sound meter.
Koz
What are you trying to accomplish? Are you exporting at text?
If you export as text data there is a dB option. (Tools → Sample Data Export.)
Regular integer WAV files are linear and they contain sample values in a range limited by the number of bits. A 16-bit WAV can hold values between −32,768 and +32,767 With floating point WAVs, 0dB is represented by +1/-1 but they can go higher if the file goes over 0dB.
You can choose in Audacity preferences that the default scale is dB …
https ://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tracks_preferences.html
However changing the scale does not change how the waveform sounds, just how it appears.