I need a simple way to send a raw audacity file (not an mp3) to someone for editing practice, without losing quality. Not sure what happened on either end, but when I tried sending a zipped file through google drive it came back sounding weird. Not good with technology, so explain as simply as possible if you have thoughts. Thanks!
Zip is lossless compression so it won’t change the sound unless something really gets fouled-up.
Probably the best thing is to share FLAC files (lossless compression optimized for audio) unless you need to share the AUP3 project file. (You can’t compress an AUP3 project to FLAC but you can export the audio from a project as FLAC.)
You should be able to zip an AUP3 file (I’ve never tried it) but it should be opened-decompressed onto a local NTFS drive. The old AUP project format was trickier to share because it was many files in a folder, but it could also be zipped.
The only thing to watch-out for is that FLAC is integer based so it will clip (distort) if you try to go over 0dB. You should avoid going over 0dB anyway, but Audacity uses floating-point internally so for all practical purpose it has no upper or lower limit.
MP3 is lossy compression. It throws-away information to make a smaller file. It tries to throw-away details you can’t hear but it’s imperfect. (Sometimes it can sometimes sound perfect.) If you open it and then re-compress it, some “damage” accumulates with every generation of compression. If you want MP3 (or other lossy format) you should compress ONCE as the last step.
If you are using Audacity 3.0 or later, you can send them the .aup3 file.
Ensure that the project is closed (quit Audacity) before you make/send their copy. (While the project is open, there may be temporary files that belong to the project.)
Note that AUP3 files can be very large.
I appreciate the help. Will it work sending it through google drive?
Don’t use Google Drive for “live” projects. Web drives are not reliable for open projects.
Once the project has been safely saved to an ordinary internal drive and the project has been closed, then it is safe to copy it to Google Drive. Tell the recipient to copy the project to their local drive before opening it in Audacity.
To speed up the upload / download, you can make a Zip of the AUP3 project file. That will make the file smaller, hence faster upload / download, but of course the recipient will have to unzip it to their local drive before opening it in Audacity.
Tip:
It is safest to name projects with letters (a to z, A to Z), numbers (0 to 9), space and underscore, and no other characters.
Definitely avoid using apostrophes, asterisks, forward slash, back slash, punctuation characters and other “special” characters, as these will cause problems on some computers.
I don’t use spaces, either.
MyReallyGreatSoundProject
Or My_Really_Great_Sound_Project
Koz
Thank you so much! It worked it great.
Laura
This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.