Hello all, I have been working on some music within audacity and the project file randomly had a severe decrease in quality out of nowhere. Is it possible to fix this? I’m not completely sure how to describe the issue but I have attached two versions of what I was working on to show the initial quality and what happened in the middle of my working on the project. Thank you in advance for your help.
Windows 10
Audacity 3.1.3
original audio
corrupted audio
UPDATE: I have also found that changing my host to Windows Wasapi makes the audio sound completely normal from what I can tell, but it won’t export in quality. I’m not sure what to do. This is my second project this has happened to.
The original clip has the sound in full fidelity with tones up to 18000Hz to 19000Hz. The damaged one sounds like AM Radio. Highest pitch tone is 5000Hz.
You should be Exporting all your original voice work as WAV (Microsoft) 16-bit sound files as backup. You should be able to point to all the parts of the song as perfect quality WAV sound files.
Never, ever do production in MP3. MP3 gets its convenient, tiny sound files by messing with musical tones…and leaving some of them out.
Audacity 3.1.3 has the ability to Save Project > Backup Project. That will give you a Project with no links or ties to the original show. Pick a good, unique name so you can find it later. That’s super handy if you have damage like this or a crash.
There is no rescue for the damaged clip. There just aren’t any high-pitched, crisp musical tones to rescue.
What kind of editing were you doing?
Koz
“runnin.mp3” (corrupted audio) has parts that are too loud and so have clipped, and the MP3 bit-rate and sample rate are both too low for high quality. There’s no way to “fix” the loss in sound quality in that file.