Audacity Forum

billw58 wrote:Going back to the gaps - does the gap always occur in the same place?

About iTunes and MP3 - like I said, I use iTunes to do the conversion simply because it is faster.

-- Bill

Just to confirm, when I say "gap" I don't mean that visually there's no music wave. It's there and the play indicator line continues to move, but there's no sound. I wont have access to the files until later this evening, so I'm not sure if they occur in the same place. I do know that it seems everything is fine say three clips in and I noticed it around the fourth clip - meaning after I tried to throw fourteen clips together, noticed the problem and then decided to try say four or five at a time I seemed to notice it around the fourth track. That's when I decided to just do three at a time.

Re: itunes.... It just happens to be that I am using itunes, but I guess my question is in general, when I'm messing with cleaning up the sound (not deleting any music), whatever end source i'd be using (itunes etc.) should I export from audacity using a wav file or is it safe to export using an mp3 file extension. Just not sure if exporting to an mp3 is going to cause the file to add silent space at the front/back of the track - which I believe I've picked up from this experience is the case when dealing with exporting mp3's.

Yes, I understand the waveform is visible on the screen but no audio plays. I'm asking if it is always in the same spot because that would point to a specific problem. When you export the song that has the missing audio, is the audio also missing in the exported file? In other words, is this a glitch in Audacity playback, or is the audio really missing?

I routinely edit together projects with upwards of 20 clips totalling over 2 hours and have never encountered the playback glitch you describe. I have done this on a very old PPC Mac, so I don't think CPU processing power is the issue.

As Steve stated earlier, any MP3 encoder will add small silent bits to the beginning and end of the exported file. You can export as MP3 (using LAME) (and not just by "changing the file extension"), or have iTunes do the conversion - the result should be pretty much the same. The advantages of exporting as WAV are: 1) export from Audacity is very fast; 2) you can have iTunes do the MP3 conversion (which is faster than LAME via Audacity); 3) you have a high-quality version of the edited song if you ever want to go back and do more work on it.

-- Bill