Extreme distortion after exporting to Ogg

[mogwaimon]

Hey, all, I mainly use Audacity to encode 12-track ogg files, and I was encoding a few earlier today and something strange happened. I encoded 5 files, all with the same settings as usual...4 worked just fine. The very first one I encoded came out garbled and distorted, also seemed like it was missing a few of the tracks or that they were extremely low. So, I opened up a new project in Audacity and re-imported the original oggs to make the 12-track ogg like usual. I then listened to it in Audacity and it sounded exactly like it's supposed to. So I exported it to .Ogg again and it came out distorted and such again.

I'm finding this quite strange because I have encoded multiple files like this and never ran into an issue like it until today.I would consider my original, individual oggs that make up the file to be suspect, but Audacity plays them just fine both separately and all together. I just re-encoded again and tried splitting the stereo tracks and it didn't work....is there anything you guys can do to help?Also, if you need any more information just let me know and I'll tell you

[Gale Andrews]

Hey, all, I mainly use Audacity to encode 12-track ogg files, and I was encoding a few earlier today and something strange happened. I encoded 5 files, all with the same settings as usual...4 worked just fine. The very first one I encoded came out garbled and distorted, also seemed like it was missing a few of the tracks or that they were extremely low. So, I opened up a new project in Audacity and re-imported the original oggs to make the 12-track ogg like usual. I then listened to it in Audacity and it sounded exactly like it's supposed to. So I exported it to .Ogg again and it came out distorted and such again.

I'm finding this quite strange because I have encoded multiple files like this and never ran into an issue like it until today.I would consider my original, individual oggs that make up the file to be suspect, but Audacity plays them just fine both separately and all together. I just re-encoded again and tried splitting the stereo tracks and it didn't work....is there anything you guys can do to help?Also, if you need any more information just let me know and I'll tell you

Are you using an old Beta version? In previous versions there was a problem with tracks not being correctly exported as soon as you started to use the mute/solo buttons (and remember that muted tracks deliberately aren't exported). The current Beta is 1.3.11.

And when you import the exported 12-track OGG back into Audacity, I take it it doesn't show as clipped on the VU playback meter, so it's some other kind of distortion? Are some of the tracks duplications of each other? That can cause phasey distortions encoding to MP3, I don't know about OGG.


Gale

[mogwaimon]

I'm using 1.3.11, yea.

What is the VU meter?Is that the green meter at the top that shows the output volume?I'm fairly new to Audacity, I only have the program for this one task so I'm only familiar with a few things.

Also, no, there are no duplicate tracks. There are 2 drum tracks, 2 guitar tracks, 2 rhythm tracks, 4 backing tracks, and 2 empty tracks.That's counting left and right stereo.

I imported the ogg back into Audacity and I just noticed the first 30 seconds of all the tracks seem to have been cut out as well. It's really noticeable because only the rhythm track is supposed to play from the beginning of the song, and that first 30 seconds is inexplicably gone It's really weird...It seems like all the tracks were mishmashed together to all start at 30 seconds into the ogg and that might be what's causing the distortion?

[waxcylinder]

What is the VU meter?Is that the green meter at the top that shows the output volume?

Actually the meter you're really interested is the red one which is the recording meter. You want to get a good level of signal while tou are recording - but what you din't want is for it ever to get right up to the right hand of the meter (when it will display a red bar) - this will give you clipping (and it distorts the signal and sounds horrible).

A couple of tips:

1) you can resize the meter toolbar by clicking and dragging - I have mine stretched across the whole witdth of the Audacity window.

2) you can turn on the clipping indicator, it is off by default. Go to View > Show Clipping and check it on. This will give you a vertical red line on the waveform whenever clipping occurs. Actuallyit goes red at 0dB which is not technically clipping - but rather just about to go into clipping - but you want to avoid getting to 0dB anyways as some players have problems with signals that reach that level.

WC

[mogwaimon]

Ooooooh, I see.The source material is already recorded and split into multiple tracks, I'm simply re-joining the tracks into one .ogg, no recording involved on this machine...but that information is very useful for if I ever need to actively record something.
Let me clarify; I'm taking pre-recorded .ogg files on my computer, importing them into Audacity to make a single 12-track .ogg, and then exporting as .ogg. I had done this multiple times with no issues at all except for this one set of files. Perhaps the issue is with my source oggs, but when I listen to them separately and when compiled in Audacity it sounds fine.Only after I export to .ogg do I get any distortion.When I import the previously exported ogg into Audacity, the tracks seem to be condensed so that they all start at the 30-second mark rather than their regularly scheduled start times.

Sorry if I was unclear before

[Gale Andrews]

Ooooooh, I see.The source material is already recorded and split into multiple tracks, I'm simply re-joining the tracks into one .ogg, no recording involved on this machine...but that information is very useful for if I ever need to actively record something.

Note that View > Show Clipping only paints clipped samples red on a per-track basis. If you had 12 tracks at 0.8 amplitude they would clip badly on the green VU playback meter (that is, show a red light to right of the meter), without the individual tracks being clipped. So does the mix show clipped on the green playback meter before you export it?

Let me clarify; I'm taking pre-recorded .ogg files on my computer, importing them into Audacity to make a single 12-track .ogg, and then exporting as .ogg. I had done this multiple times with no issues at all except for this one set of files. Perhaps the issue is with my source oggs, but when I listen to them separately and when compiled in Audacity it sounds fine.Only after I export to .ogg do I get any distortion.When I import the previously exported ogg into Audacity, the tracks seem to be condensed so that they all start at the 30-second mark rather than their regularly scheduled start times.

I have tried exporting some multi-channel OGG files from 1.3.12 Alpha on Windows XP and I can't find any real problem. Note that OGG is a lossy format. Have you tried clicking "Options" when you choose the exported file name and increasing the Quality from Default level 5? Have you tried exporting as WAV?

Are you sure you did not choose File > Export Selection with a selection region starting at 30 seconds?

Without a copy of the .aup project file and the _data folder that gives the problematic export, it's hard to comment more at the moment.



Gale