I have recorded LP’s using an ION USB conversion turntable. They show up as 192kbps MP3 files in iTunes. When opening these files in Audacity in order to separate the recording into individual tracks with song titles, I set the sampling rate as 192,000 in Preferences but get the error “192000 sample rate and bit rate of 128kbps not supported by MP3 format. Use 48,000 sample rate”
What am I doing wrong? Thanks
It’s probably useful to note that Audacity doesn’t edit MP3. It pulls the music in as an Audacity custom format and then creates a whole new MP3 when you’re done.
Audacity default MP3 Export (that I remember) is Stereo 128.
It’s certainly possible that the “lame” MP3 generation software doesn’t support your settings. Audacity is a complete slave to what lame does.
Koz
“Sample rate” and MP3 “bit rate” are not the same thing.
The most common audio sample rate (as used on audio CDs) is 44100 Hz. This is the default sample rate for Audacity and unless you have a specific need (such as DVD authoring) you are unlikely to need to change that.
MP3 format reduces the file size of audio by discarding some of the data and squashing the rest of the data together. This process is called “digital compression” The greater the compression, the smaller the file size, but the worse the sound quality will be. The amount of compression is specified by the amount of data per second that is used to store the audio and it is measured in “kbps” (kilobits per second). For reasonable quality stereo music, the bit rate needs to be at least 128 kbps, preferably more. This has nothing to do with the sample rate.
Leave the “sample rate” in Audacity at 44100 Hz.
When you export to MP3 you can set the “bit rate” for the MP3 by clicking on the “Options” button in the export dialogue screen http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/file_export_dialog.html
Ideally you should work with uncompressed WAV files rather than MP3 files as the quality of MP3s is not as good, and more damage is caused by MP3 compression each time it is encoded.
Thank you very much !