I have created a new song. And I put the Amplification on my vocals. And ahh little Echo on my chorus.
And inside Audiacity it sounds great. But then when I export to like .Wav or .Mp3 file. And then I play the song with like VLC Player… Then it sounds awful ! . Both the vocals and the beat sound distorted! And I didn’t add any distortion effect to the song.
How do I get the song to sound just the same as in .Wav file as in the Audacity PC app itself? I never had this issue before.
Not enough information. What Windows? What version of Audacity? Show screenshots of the project and the master bus
First, make sure you are using a high-enough MP3 bitrate. That’s probably not the problem but MP3 is lossy and it throws-away information to make a smaller file. The lower the bitrate, the smaller the file and the more information is thrown away.
Next… Are you configured to Show Clipping? View → Show Clipping in Waveform. I never remember if it’s on by default…
If you “see red”, run the Amplify or Normalize effect and accept the default to bring-down the volume.
Clipping is regular-old “overload distortion” when you go “too loud”. Digital audio is generally limited to 0dBFS.
Audacity uses floating-point internally so Audacity itself has virtually no upper or lower limits and it can sound OK. But if you play at "full digital volume, your digital-to-analog converter will clip, and many file formats are also limited to 0dB your exported file shouldn’t go over 0dB and this should be considered the “digital maximum”.
If you have clipping, you’ll have to start-over. The exported file can’t be fixed.
Audacity will “show red” for potential clipping even if it’s not clipped yet. So if you over-amplify or use an effect that pushes the peaks over 0dB you can recover if you adjust-down the volume before exporting.
MP3 can go over 0dB and I don’t think it has a hard-limit but it CAN overload. And even if the MP3 itself isn’t distorted, the listener can clip their DAC if they play at full-digital volume.