which is the best way to save my audio files, wav or mp3, i don’t know the difference. i just want to transfer my lp to cd’s, and play on any cd player. thanks
Playing your music on your personal music player and storing them in archive are different.
If you need to send something to the internet or play it on your iPod, that’s a good place for MP3. MP3 makes small files, but it creates distortion while it does it. Usually, if you’re jogging on the beach or hiking along a busy roadway, you won’t notice it.
You can’t easily edit MP3 or do other production. For that you need WAV. WAV files are very much larger, but you can open them up later and do production and make anything else, including an MP3 with no increase in distortion or damage.
So your archive, Save-It-For-Later should be in WAV.
There are gray areas. People immediately post that they don’t have room for WAV. Then use MP3 and all you can do is listen to the files. No production or editing.
Koz
Sorry. Missed a step. If you want to make an Audio CD later, you should use WAV. The quality of music on an Audio CD is WAV. So your capture and the CD will be the same very high quality.
A note that home Audio CDs are not archival quality. They have the same archive quality as a color photo and as the sound dye later fades, there goes the music. Keep these things out of direct sunshine.
Koz
As Koz said, for making a CD, export as WAV.
There’s a series of tutorials here that may help: Audacity Manual