I have no trouble recording things with Audacity. I like to capture songs from YouTube. The files sound flawless when I play them back in Audacity, but as soon as I save them off, no matter what format or what settings, they always sound like they’ve had some kind of filtering applied. They sound muffled. The crispness of the original isn’t there anymore, making it unusable for me. It is subtle, but it is definitely there. Any audiophile can hear it. Unless my tastes have changed and I’ve become more sensitive to lossy formats, it seems to me like this was never a problem before. Any ideas?
no matter what format or what settings
Such as?
And you didn’t do ANYTHING except record and export?
What about when you re-open in Audacity?
making it unusable for me. It is subtle, but it is definitely there. Any audiophile can hear it.
Subtle and and listenable is an “interesting” combination. 
If you’re that picky, maybe you shouldn’t be stealing lossy music from YouTube. 
Such as m4a format, mp3 format, wma, wav format. They all sound the same. Muffled. Like they were recorded on a microphone wrapped in a towel. I’ve tried all bit and sampling rates. No change. Whether music or any other thing people use it for, a recording should duplicate high quality sound, not filter, dampen, and obscure the tones. Since this post is about solutions and not a platform for justifying what I do with the bitstreams that come into my house to uninvited critics, I’ll leave it at that.
I do sympathise with you. Your first time on the forum, looking for help and getting a lecture instead. I have three suggestions that are intended to be actually useful to you. First try recording with something else to rule out (or confirm) Audacity as the culprit. I would try Ocenaudio which is also free. Second, I use Clipgrab to download stuff from YouTube. It’s quicker than recording in real-time and can save just the audio stream from a video. Lastly, when you have tried those, if you want to send me one of your project files, I can try to recreate your issue on my non-Windows PC.
Apart from WAV, those are all “lossy” compressed formats. When exporting in a lossy format, some loss of sound quality is unavoidable - the severity of the losses depends on the format and the compression settings.
If you export as 16-bit WAV, 44100Hz sample rate, then the exported audio should sound indistinguishable from the recording in Audacity.
“Muffled” exported WAV files is most likely due to the sample rate being too low - for high quality audio, the sample rate needs to be at least 44100 Hz.
(post deleted by author)
Thanks for your inputs. I downloaded both of those packages and gave them a try. Long story short, they were all the same. I was surprised that the Clipgrab of the video with original audio only format did the same thing, so I took my original file that I encoded a long time ago in Audacity and dropped it back into Audacity to see what it would sound like in the Audacity player. Turns out my problem wasn’t the file encoding, but the player settings. My Windows Media Player just has crappy settings. It’s a new computer, so I haven’t opened the equalizer to mess around with the frequency response. In any case, I really appreciate your help. Your suggestions opened the way for me to discover what the real issue was.
1 Like
Turns out it was the player settings, not the encoding of the file. Thanks for your help!