Have been using Audacity for abut three year and LOVE it, but now I’ve run into a snag.
I am writing/sing church songs/hymns. I use Musescore to produce my score, then break the score up and covert to a png format. Next I creat a Power Point presentation like you see displayed during many church song services. Finally, I import my Audacity audio (mp3) into the Power Point presentation to make a slide show. The idea is to be able to learn a song by playing the audio and words/musical score at the same time. NO problems up to this point.
About 4 months ago, when I would “create a video” from my Power Point slideshow, the audio would skip intermittently throughout the presentation. After working with Microsoft “experts” for the last 3 months, they claim there is incompatibility between powerpoint and Audacity when using the video conversion.
I inserted a non-Audacity mp3 into the slideshow and there were NO skips.
Updated to the latest version of Audacity, and its somewhat better, but still skips. I’d like to post videos on youtube, but the skipping is too “amateur”.
MP3 isn’t one thing. It has settings and configurations. Could this be the difference between stereo and mono? What quality/data rate did you use? Middle of the road for stereo is 128. You can go down to 32 on a mono show and almost get away with it.
Audiobook submission requirements are 192 or higher.
Constant Bitrate is recommended and best supported over anything else.
I’m guessing that if you play the MP3 before it has been mangled by the video converter, that it plays perfectly. Is that the case?
My guess is that they mean that the video conversion software and / or PowerPoint, have problems with variable bit-rate MP3 encoding.
It was quite common in old software, for variable bit-rate (VBR) support to be buggy. Unfortunately, even though VBR has been an official part of the MP3 standard for over 20 years, some software producers have never bothered to fix those bugs. Even Windows Media Player will often report the wrong length of VBR encoded MP3s (which is a bug in Windows Media Player).
Is there some reason why you have to use MP3? It is generally recommended to do production in WAV format so as to avoid unnecessary sound quality degradation.
If you can’t use WAV for some reason, try exporting as “Constant bit-rate” MP3 (CBR). To do that, select “Constant” as the “bit-rate mode” in the MP3 settings: MP3 Export Options - Audacity Manual