Audacity 2.1.2
Windows 10 Pro
Hello, so I’ve been getting back into recording. I am recording verbal commentary using a Blue Snowball. I finished cleaning up the file of any background noise. When I play the track in audacity where there is silence is just that dead silence. However when I export it, I’ve tried it on three file formats being wav, flac, and mp3 files. Some having worse than the others from order of worst to best being wav, flac, and mp3. So I was wondering as to why are these exported audio files consisting of noise? While in audacity itself it is pure blissful silence.
How are you listening? You’re supposed to set the playback volume for comfortable listening and then roll into the quiet segment without touching anything. You’re not allowed to crank up the volume until it bleeds and then complain you found noise. You will. Audacity adds a tiny dithering Noise Signal to every export to keep digitizing errors from adding up.
You can turn dithering off and just put up with the distortion.
Audacity > Edit > Preferences > Quality.
Koz
Just to make sure you’re comparing “apples to apples”, are you re-importing the files into Audacity and playing them back exactly as you were listening in Audacity originally?
from order of worst to best being wav, flac, and mp3.
FLAC is lossless so it should be identical to WAV (assuming the same sample rate an bit depth) and although MP3 is lossy, it shouldn’t be adding noise during silent parts. When it comes to background noise, there shouldn’t be any difference between these 3 formats. (And, at high bitrates/quality settings MP3 can often sound identical to the WAV or FLAC.)