I just recently switched from my old Zoom H4N to the Zoom H4Essential and so I am new to 32bit float files.
I record from a Earhook Headset Omnidirectional Mic through a Samsung Wireless Transmitter into the H4E via XLR connector for my voice as the speaker and the built in mic for questions from the group. The setting is just a living room. Sound comes from both carpeted and uncarpeted regions of the meeting area.
My question is - when taking this 32bit float file down to mp3 for export (to be used both as just mp3 and attached to a video file for the audio on the video) what are the best settings?
Not sure if my Audacity set up is standard or not, but my options are…
Bit rate mode: Present - Variable - Average - Constant
Quality: in kbps
Variable speed: (various options)
Channel Mode
Again the intended audience is for playback on phones, mp3 devices, web browsers and as the audio portion of a mp4 file uploaded to YouTube.
The thing about 32-bit floating point is that it can go over 0dB. Run the Amplify or Normalize effect to make sure the level is “safe” before you convert it to another format or import it into your video editor.
It’s hard to say because there are lots of variables. 256kbps is usually good-enough for anything. The highest MP3 bitrate is 320kbps. The highest-quality variable bitrate setting is “V0”.
Do you mean variable bitrate? You probably don’t want to monkey with the speed!
With VBR (variable bitrate) the algorithm determines the bitrate moment-to-moment as required for the quality settings. i.e. You don’t need as many bits for silence or “simple sounds”, etc.
ABR (average bitrate) is also variable but it allows you to determine the overall-average bitrate which also controls file size.
Mono is probably better in your situation. Your headset mic is mono and the group mic is probably mono and you don’t want the sounds "moving around’ between left & right.
With MP3 it doesn’t really hurt to have convert mono to stereo (dual mono) but the file properties would show-up incorrectly as stereo.
Now… MP3 is unusual in an audio/video file. AAC (same as MP4 or M4A) is more common. Or it can be uncompressed LPCM (same underlying format as WAV). And YouTube is going to convert it again to whatever they use…
AND when you combine the audio & video with your video editor the video editor should allow you to choose the audio format and settings. So you can probably feed a WAV file (16, 24, or 32-bit) into your video editor. And it’s best to avoid lossy-to-lossy conversion so it’s better to feed lossless audio (WAV or FLAC) to your video editor.
I appreciate your detailed response. When I open Audacity to process next time I will do so with this post open to follow as a guide. Thank you so much!