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How apply a chain to a set of files works
Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2011 1:59 pm
by Kettir
I put together a chain of commands. I found how to apply it to several files on my hard drive. I was stumped for a while when it didn't appear to actually save the files (which began and should end as MP3 format). I finally figured out that I had to actually add the "export" command to the end of the chain of commands. As a newbie, this wasn't immediately evident to me, although I'm sure to experienced users of batch processing it seems obvious. So I'm posting this just in case someone like me does a search on the forum (as I did) and doesn't find any hints (I didn't, probably because it's so obvious.)
Re: How apply a chain to a set of files works
Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2011 4:05 pm
by kozikowski
It's only obvious if you use Audacity in non-batch mode. Audacity has never been able to "Save" an MP3 file. It's a common problem that people "Save" an AUP file thinking that's a sound file. It's not and you have to go to some trouble to get an MP3 Export.
If you never did straight, non-chained, single sound file management, you would never know you had to do that.
And as an afterthought, it didn't work, did it? the sound damage to your files was quite some bit more severe that you thought, or the files at the same quality had to be much bigger than you started.
Audacity is not an MP3 editor. It takes apart the MP3 file for editing and then makes a new one later. That always causes compression damage, sometimes very severe. For example if you opened a stereo music file encoded at 64kbps (barely adequate) and tried to export at 64 (same file size), the new music file would be unlistenable.
Koz