I’ve been mixing and mastering a set of songs for the past year in a DAW I have on my iPhone, and Audacity has been an important part of that for quite a while, as I use it to make minor edits and make sure each track is at most -1 db. This month, however, I’ve started noticing that the resulting WAV files I’ve been sending to peers on Discord don’t function at all in it’s embedding. Pressing play on them simply shows the timecode as “0:00 / 0:00”, when they are absolutely not that.
Furthermore, I’ve realized that the file size post-export is unnecessarily and exponentially larger than it was before I put it through Audacity.
I put a track that lasts 3:56 (min: sec) into Audacity, with the file size being 41.30 MB, but the exported version, while being the same exact length, is now 159 MB.
Both are WAV files, both are the exact same length, and yet they are massively different in file size.
Another example is a track I mixed that ended up being 7:11, yet the pre-export version is 72.6 MB, and the post-export version is 290 MB.
This is a serious problem, as I have very little space on my hard drive, and I’m not exactly in a financial situation where I can just get a new one. This also worries me that the files are corrupted in some way, and won’t work whenever I distribute them.
If you (accidentally) increase the sample-rate, or the bit-depth, in Audacity,
that will increase the size of the WAV file, and can make it incompatible with some software, (unplayable).
I just checked the bitrates of one of the pairs I mentioned and that seems to check out. I’ll see if exporting it in the same bitrate will fix it. If it does, thank you so much!
Edit: It works. I had to download a previous version of Audacity though because the current one just has no way to change the bitrate (at least no way I could find, I looked up tutorials and everything but every single one was for older versions or Mac OS only), regardless, thank you so much for your help!