So, I finally achieved recording, saved to mp3, and played back what I had recorded successfully. During the recording I watched the graph showing the music(vinyl) recording. I decided all was in order so I got a vinyl album I wanted to save to mp3 but when I touched record no graph & although I saved there was no playback audio in my file. So, what am I doing wrong trying a new project to get the desirable results? Probably something ridiculously simple…alas…not for me.
So, I finally achieved recording, saved to mp3, and played back what I had recorded successfully.
OK, but are you saying you don’t really have a saved MP3 file?
If you have a saved MP3 file, you should be able to re-open it in Audacity, or play it with Windows Media Player, etc.
After recording, you can either Save your Audacity project, or use File → Export to create an an audio file (WAV, MP3, AAC, etc.). And if you have not done so already, you’ll need to install the optional LAME encoder to make MP3s.
If you open an audio file for editing, you need to export again instead of “save”.
Once this problem is solved…
It’s best to save (“export”) to WAV (or FLAC) first. When you are done with all of your editing, you can create an MP3 once as the last step if that’s the format you want.
MP3 (and AAC) is lossy compression. Audacity (and all “regular” audio editors) have to de-compress it before editing. That means an additional lossy compression step if you re-save to MP3.