Audacity Forum

Hi,
I just installed Audacity stable. I have an M-Audio Audiophile 192 PCI in a Dell desktop running XP.
I have an Otari analog tapedeck connected to the analog inputs in the M-Audio card.
I am dubbing analog tapes for a friend who wants 44.1 KHz, 24 bit files so that he can
do processing on the data. I made the recording and I can play it back in Audacity, and it
sounds fine, and the meters show it having at least 5db of headroom from the peaks.
I exported it to a 24 Bit PCM WAV file. My default sound quality is 24 bit, and the default
sample rate is 44.1 KHz. When I made the recording, I actually couldn't change the
level at all except by changing it at the tape deck, and I would have wanted a bit
more if I could, but I found some possible solutions to that in this forum,
but that isn't the main problem.
To verify that the export came out OK, I opened it in Audacity, and when I play that,
it shows as being 32 bit float, and it's severely clipped. The displayed envelope
completely fills the band. The sound is correspondingly awful.
Any ideas?
Charlie

Try to make the recording in 16-bit 44100 as a test. I bet that recording sails right through the pipeline. 24-bit is turning out to be serious magic and it doesn't always behave like you think.

I do live recording at 48000, 16 bit and I've been very successful with client deliveries--and I'm working from a live performance, not an already compressed show.

Koz

Koz,
16 bits would have been plenty for me, 24 is a customer requirement because is was
going to do downstream processing. I figured it out in any case, although the behavior
of the program is still a little odd. I changed the header to WAVEX in an export. When
I read the export back into Audacity, it still called it 32 bit float, but it was able to play it
OK and there was no clipping. It also played fine in WMP on my machine, and Itunes on
a MAC.
That has now shipped. The remaining bug is that it doesn't display the correct data
format in the track viewwhat's in the file, but just the value of the header. Apparently
WAVEX covers more than one data type. This is easy to live with as bugs go.
In a related topic, is there any visibility on support of this card under Linux?
(Audiophile 192 PCI)
Thanks,
Charlie

<<<The remaining bug is that it doesn't display the correct data
format in the track viewwhat's in the file, but just the value of the header. >>>

Yes. Several people noticed some entertaining fiction happening when Audacity manages file types. You're fine as long as you never interact with other programs or services.

If you do, it gets Twilight Zone in a hurry.

Koz

Koz,
That's why I was preplexed to find that Itunes and WMP figured it out just fine.
Thanks again,
Charlie.