I have been and always will be a friend of Audacity!
I work with segments in my podcast. Rather than recreate the wheel each time a do a segment I use templates for the reused bumpers or music beds. It dawned on me the other day that saving projects might not be saving lossless versions of my audio and music. Also, I got a strange message from one of my templates that indicated that there were lost orphans in the file that could not be used. So my questions are:
Does “Save Project” save lossless or high-quality recordings?
Are these orphans I encountered because I reused “project saves” as templates?
Is there a better way to create reusable templates in audacity?
I have been doing my podcast now since 2011, you would have thought I would have thought of this before now!
“Save Project” uses the same (lossless) 32-bit float format that is used while Audacity is open. There is no format conversion during “Save Project”.
“Orphans” can occur for many reasons. They are bits of data that are “left over” from an earlier project - usually they occur because Audacity was unable to remove old “undo” data on close. For example, the computer is powered off while Audacity is open, then Audacity will be forced to close before it has cleaned up unused left-overs.
Creating a “template” project that contains the parts common to multiple projects, sounds like a good approach. I’ve used this approach myself on occasion.