Audacity Forum

I have exported to the file to say my desktop, not sure why it wont play in itunes ... i am guesing my settings arent right can anyone help?

You finished your show and then Export As WAV, right? If that didn't slide right into iTunes, you may need to change one or two Audacity Preferences.

Audacity 1.2 comes out of the box set for 44100, 32-bit, Mono. iTunes is expecting 44100, 16-bit, Stereo. Change these in Audacity Preferences. Restart Audacity to make sure the settings stick.

There is one more setting I need that I can't find. I need to post. Hang in.

While you're waiting, pull down piano2.wav from here...

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

...and make sure that drops into iTunes OK. That's a 48000/16/Stereo clip, the television sound standard. That's the other format we expect to work perfectly.

Koz

Koz thanks champ

I am saving them as mp3 as they save you space right??? (correct me if I am wrong) anyway I got it working however I have a mac book running leopard X & have the settings for file format @ AIFF (Apple/SGI 32 bit float) is that best

The best format and the least trouble one may be different. Music CDs are produced at 44100, 16-bit, Stereo. iTunes converts incoming music to its own internal compressed format, usually some version of AAC. I use iTunes plus 256 Stereo. If you burn a Music CD, iTunes has to convert the compressed music back up to uncompressed 44100, but the quality never recovers from the compression damage.

Music CDs contain 80 minutes of music. No matter what you do to the music ahead of time and how much damage you cause, you are only going to get 80 minutes on there, so it's beneficial to start with the very highest quality you can get. That would be WAV or AIFF. Forget MP3.

However. Some iTunes systems don't like 32-bit floating, so even though it's a really good format, it doesn't matter if iTunes won't accept it.

So we keep sliding back to doing all your work in 44100, 16-bit, Stereo.

If you want to get completely compulsive (and who doesn't), you can go into iTunes Preferences and change the import characteristics to AIFF Auto or WAV Auto. Produce your music at 44100, 16-bit, Stereo and iTunes will carry exactly that quality all the way to the finished Music CD. No compression and no damage.

That means you have to do it all again if you want the compressed work for your iPod. You can't do both.


To confuse you as much as possible, all this is assuming you want to make a universal, standard Music CD that your mum can play. If you want to make a Data CD, basically a shiny thin hard drive, you can put as many MP3s on there as you want. Days worth of music, but you need a player that knows how to play MP3s. Some cars can do that now. Your mum's CD player will have no idea how to play that, but almost all computers will be OK with it.

All the modern tools depend more and more on knowing what the destination is. The older tools didn't care.

Koz

kozikowski wrote: That means you have to do it all again if you want the compressed work for your iPod. You can't do both.

Or you could:
1) Set iTunes to import WAV or AIFF as Koz says (use Edit>Preferences>General and click on the Import Settings button)
2) Burn the CD (giving you lossless quality)
3) Re-set iTunes to import AAC at your required bitrate
4) Then get iTunes to do the conversion to AAC (use Advanced > Create AAC version in iTunes)
5) Delete the WAV/AIFF versions (you can tell the difference from the bitrate) - but since you have to select the tracks for conversion you should just be able to press Delete in iTunes after the conversion to delete the selected WAVs/AIFFs - but take care with this !!

WC

<<<4) Then get iTunes to do the conversion to AAC (use Advanced > Create AAC version in iTunes)>>>

Ooooo. This is me writing that one down.

Koz

There is a down side to that. If you have playlists that are "standing" on your old, uncompressed file and you delete it, that will damage the playlist.

Koz

Yes it may require a bit of housekeeping to keep such playlists intact.

It's a shame the in the conversion that iTunes doesn't offer the option of replacing the existing music file and in the process adjusting all pointers from playlists etc. This would also enable me to remove step 5 from my workflow, the deletion of the original WAV. What are the chances of a Dear Bill feature request .... ??

Actually for me the playlists are not an issue as I make the recording then load the WAVs in temporarily so that I can immediately convert them to AAC format and then delete the WAVs. Then I add the AAC versions to any requesite playlist.

WC