Hi audacity community, I want to cut certain parts out of my songs. I have mixed & mastered songs and I want to select for instance 30 seconds out of the 3 minute track and cut that out and export it. Is this process in any way going to reduce the original quality of the file? The original file is a wav and I would export as wav. Thx a lot in advance.
Exporting as 16-bit WAV “may” introduce a tiny bit of noise, depending on the source material and what processing has been done to it. The amount of noise, if present at all, is almost insignificant.
Exporting as 32-bit float WAV perfectly preserves the original quality of the audio in the project, but the file size will be double the size of a 16-bit WAV, and not all media players can handle 32-bit float.
Even at 16-bit WAV format preserves the sound quality almost perfectly.
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I like the 16-bit WAV format as opposed to two other possibilities.
— MP3 which is common, insanely popular, and produces tiny, convenient sound files, but also burns in permanent compression sound damage. The damage gets worse each time you make a new one and you can’t stop it.
— Audacity Projects, while carrying perfect sound quality, are huge, brittle, and easily damaged. Projects—as above—only open in Audacity, and sometimes not even then.
Koz