AudiOw
November 4, 2018, 12:40pm
4
WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit is the go-to format for production. The bitrate is 1411. The only shortcoming is the tiny dither signal that Audacity adds to exports to avoid filter and effects errors from accumulating. You may not want to, but you can turn that off.
Audacity internally works at 32-floating (not 16-bit) in order that effects and filters don’t produce distortion. The only time you may experience distortion is if you create a show that won’t fit in conventional file formats at export .
Pay attention to the bouncing sound meter to make sure your show doesn’t go over 0dB. If you have multiple tracks, you can Tracks > Mix > Mix and Render to a New Track. Audacity will create a fresh track exactly how your show is going to appear when you export a sound file and Audacity creates a mix for you.
Koz
steve has replied to the same question I had, only about editing a FLAC file and not a 320kbps file, this:
If you only perform cut / copy / paste / delete type “edits”, and no “processing”, then Audacity can do that entirely losslesly by temporarily turning off “dither”. To do that, open “Preferences” from the Edit menu, then in the “Quality” section, set “High Quality conversion → Dither” to “none”.
Does his reply apply in this case too, or is it different because it’s a 320kbps file and not a FLAC originally?
I should have mentioned that by “editing losslesly” the 320kbps file I meant what steve described in his reply I quoted; “cut edits and no processing”.