Scrambled audio when added to youtube or Whatsapp

Hello all

I’m new to Audacity and have an issue which I have been unable to resolve or find an answer to on the forums. Any help appreciated please.

I am using Audacity 2.4.1 on a windows 10 machine.

My partner has recorded meditations, we clean up the background noise then export them. When played locally on her default application they play fine, when we upload to Whatsapp they play fine when she clicks the link locally but when played on another device they are very quiet and scrambledy (can hear some words).

We tried making a youtube video using the MP3 file and also a wave file and the same as above happened. Files play fine locally but once uploaded are garbled.

I made a very short test recording (different microphone) to try different settings and it worked immediately on whatsapp, however my partners’ meditations are 6-40minutes long.

Could anyone offer any clues as to what might be going on? Could it be a hardware issue? It is not the fastest machine.

Thank you.
Keith