what format to export to put it on mp3 player

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

I installed Audacity 2.0.2 using .exe installer. I have Windows XP. I am recording cassette tapes to put on my husbands 4 GB MP3 player. After recording I did Click Removal and Normalize and removed extra silences and exported in Wav 16 bit (like the manual suggested for burning a CD)to my computer. I moved it into Windows media player and burned a CD. I then put it on my husbands MP3 player and the sound quality on the MP3 is horrible. The CD sounds great. How do I get better quality sound on the MP3? Do I need to export in MP3 format to put it on the player?

2

You can either export from Audacity as MP3 (requires that you have LAME isntalled http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_installation_and_plug_ins.html#lame) or you can use a third party mMP3 encoder to convert the WAV files.

We generally recommend exporting a WAV file from Audacity even if you want MP3 files as the end result so that you retain one perfect quality copy of the original recording (MP3 encoding always reduces the sound quality to some extent).

MP3 encoding is a trade-off between file size and sound quality. Bigger files do less damage to the sound than smaller (more compressed) files.
MP3 settings are made in Audacity by clicking the Options button in the Export dialogue screen: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/file_export_dialog.html

For good quality stereo music I would suggest that you try the “Preset: Normal” setting.

3

Should I export twice then? one as a WAV and then one as an MP3?

4

I would do. The WAV file is your high quality backup and the MP3 is ready for loading onto the MP3 player.

5

You can go from perfect WAV files down to any other format, but once you have a compressed and damaged MP3, that’s the end of the line. It will never get any better than that.

Koz

6

Hello. I’ve got a question regarding LAME.
On the FAQ page there is a link to LAME (http://lame1.buanzo.com.ar/) but I also saw that there seems to be an official link on sourceforge.net (http://lame.sourceforge.net/). What is the difference between these?

Thank you in advance.

7

Thanks for the help

8

You’re welcome.

http://lame.sourceforge.net/ is the home site of the LAME project.
The LAME project do not offer “executable” files, they only provide source code.

http://lame1.buanzo.com.ar/ provides a third party executable build of LAME that is compatible with Audacity.