Merging tracks adds noise at high frequencies

Hello, I have updated recently Audacity to 3.6.4 version (from 3.5.1).

I edit some voiceovers and I use a spectral removal function a lot. I notice, that almost with every change I made to my tracks, a noise at high frequencies is added (cca above 16 kHz). However, this happens also when I merge my tracks together - the noise is also added at the places where I have digitaly zero sound (done by Ctrl+L).

First, I think this could be related to some global display properties of the spectrogram, but I checked my old projects and there is no issue. Concerning sound properties, everything is recorded with 44.1 kHz sampling rate, 16-bit, the same is the setting for the project.

Do you have any ideas what is behing that?

It might be dither.

Dither is added noise that’s supposed to sound better than quantization noise. The “rule” is - Dither when down-sampling (i.e. from 24 to 16-bits).

But as a practical matter, with 16-bits or more you can’t hear dither or quantization noise under normal listening conditions so it’s not that important one way or the other.

Thanks for the advise! :slight_smile: I have tried to change this setting and it solved the problem.