recording and quality loss!

hello, just wanna say audacity is wow! such a great piece of engineering. waaaay complicated :open_mouth: imagine doing that :astonished: anyway, my question is pretty simple and thanks for your help: if I copy my audacity file to a usb, then upload this usb file to another computer, and then carry on with my project on another computer, will this sequence of copies (twice copied) somehow and in any way lead to a loss of quality?

also btw I have done this and actually the second copy onto my new computer crackles regularly. this is why I asked the q btw. however, I exported the new crackly copy onto windows media player and the WMP copy does not crackle s so that’s not a problem. does this crackle happen often? has anyone else noticed that? and will my WMP version be somehow not as quality as say the original file on my old computer?

thanks!

An “Audacity Project” is not a “file”, it is a file and a folder.

Example:
Save a project as “myproject”.
This creates a file called “myproject.aup” and a folder called “myproject_data”.
The “_data” folder contains the audio data.
The “.aup” file contains everything else.

If you have either the “.aup” or the “_data” but not the other, then you have nothing. Both parts are essential.

See here for how to safely manage Audacity projects: Managing Audacity Projects - Audacity Manual


Assuming that you manage your projects in the safe manner described in the manual, there will be no loss of sound quality.


That’s probably a playback issue on the second computer and not directly related to the project. Audacity projects have a lot more data than most ordinary audio files, so they are more demanding on the system. Audacity doesn’t play well with buggy or badly written sound card drivers. The first step in trouble shooting playback problems is to ensure that the system is fully updated.

that’s really cool thanks for the help. yes I have definitely been through that ‘aup plus data equals the thing’ learning curve already :smiley: