Audacity Forum

I am running 1.2.6. When I export my MP files into Audacity and play them they sound fine. When I have edited them, converted them back to MP3 and play them using Windows Media Player the quality is not nearly as good, any ideas please?

Thankyou

Yes, the problem is that you are recompressing previously compressed audio - hence the degradation in quality. It's like taking packet chicken soup, adding the water and then freeze drying it again - the "quality" gets worse.


Ideally you should be doing all production and editing with lossless WAV files - and then MP3 i the final output delivery medium.

I realize that in the case you hav cited this may be a problem as you may only have the MP3 file and no access to an uncompressed version.

WC

Thankyou for the reply WC, at least I understand the problem now.

You could improve it by changing the the parameters for encoding
(theoretically upto the same quality you hear from Audacity - but you have to pay by the size of the file).

(
But in 1.2.6:
is there possibility to choose the paramaters? Check perpahs in Preferences. The default quality is
sometimes not good enough for spoken material, which surprised me recently (artifacts).
In 1.3.x: yes (with substantial bug fixes in recent 1.3.7)
)

Thanks Jan, time to upgrade then.