Aud 2.0.6 .dmg on Mc 10.6.8 and 2.11 .dmg on a Mac 10.8
Is there a potential quality problem if I do some editing work (no effects) on an aud project, export as a .wav, and then reimport that wav to audacity to do some more work on it? .Wavs are MUCH smaller than the aup/data files for transferring between computers.
This is voice work, for acx. Not music.
How much of a problem?
Audacity projects are “huge” because the audio data is stored in extremely high quality 32-bit float format.
Exporting as 16-bit WAV is “only” CD quality, so yes there is some loss of “quality”, though the loss is extremely small. The size of this “loss” is insignificant for most purposes, but for very high quality work it is preferable to avoid even these tiny losses. To do so, export as 32-bit float WAV (in the “other uncompressed files” format options: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/file_export_dialog.html
(note that the current version of Audacity is 2.1.1, and the link above is for the 2.1.1 manual. The current version of Audacity is available here: http://web.audacityteam.org/download/)
Just to add also, if you do export from 32-bit float projects to 16-bit audio files, low level dither noise is added because of the downconversion of bit depth. This is generally regarded as preferable to harmonic distortion which might occur if you don’t dither.
Exporting 32-bit float WAV instead will still be more portable than an Audacity project, even if just as large (unless it’s a mixdown of multiple tracks).
Gale