Audacity Forum

Hi, im new to audacity and have run into a slight bump in my recording process. My setup consists of my device from which im recording being connected to my line-in/microphone jack via a 3.5mm-3.5mm cable. All sounds great... while in audacity. once i export to either wav or mp3, the quality turns to garbage, sounding scratchy and higher pitch with less bottom end [bass].

im on a dell inspiron 1521 [laptop] with a latest version of the sigma-tel driver.
if theres any other info you need, i can provide it.

any help would be great, i just cant imagine why it records great, but saves awful.

thanks in advance,
[Matt]

Vista?

<<<once i export to either wav or mp3, the quality turns to garbage>>>

As played on what?

http://www.kozco.com/tech/soundtests.html

Can you pull that short Piano Trill down and play it on your system? Does it sound like seven perfect piano notes?

Has this ever worked?

While you're up there, does your system pass that Left-Right sound test? All the way through. Pretend you captured that test live.

Koz

yeah, its vista. and the panning is correct. the problem lies in the recordings, its when i play them on any player, even when i upload them to my music myspace, they still sound pretty bad, as far as quality of sound goes. =/

[Matt]

bump.

[Matt]

well i figured it out, no thanks to anyone lurking around here.
i just patched the signal through my guitar amp, which has an equalizer on it - thus controlling the lower-end drop-out i was having.

...just in case anyone else had a similar problem, this is the only solution i could find.
if you have some type of an equalizer, a few bucks in adapters at radioshack isnt so bad...



[Matt]

Audacity has an Equalizer built in, so you should not need to go through an external one.

Probably the main reason for the lack of response to your question, is that nobody knows the answer. If you play an audio file in Audacity, it will sound exactly the same as playing that same audio file in any other media program, unless that other program is applying some effect to it. The reason why this is so is because Audacity does not and can not apply any effects in real time, so the audio data is passed directly to the audio hardware.

If however you are listening to Audacity on a computer, and playing through speakers, and are comparing that to the sound from some other hardware, such as an mp3 player, playing through other speakers, or through headphones, then of course it will sound different. For serious audio work you should listen to your recording and editing through high quality monitor speakers, or at least good quality headphones. Laptop speakers are totally unsuitable.

well the problem isnt dealing with real-time issues or any other platforms [mp3 players, etc].
again, i record the audio, play it in audacity... it sounds fine.
i export it to mp3 format, and it sounds like garbage through my speakers.

i have a hard time believing every single media player is adding some sort of effect. =/

[Matt]

some_guy_named_matt wrote: i record the audio, play it in audacity... it sounds fine.i export it to mp3 format, and it sounds like garbage through my speakers.

What if you export as WAV?

same thing, either way, it needs to be mp3 format as i upload my stuff to my myspace, which only excepts mp3s.

[Matt]

So if you "Import" a WAV file into Audacity, (for example the test files that koz posted earlier), does it sound the same or different to if you play it in your media player? What Media Player are you using?