no sound when exporting to mp3

[gliss]

I'm using audacity 1.3.12-beta under SuSE 11.3 with Lame properly installed. I have exported several project files to mp3 format successfully. However, some projects that sound perfectly well when played as .au-files do not export properly, i.e. the resulting mp3-files do not produce sound when played with 'kaffeine', 'vlc', or 'amarok'.

My export settings are: quality = standard (170-210 ) kbit/s; variable speed = standard; channel mode = joint stereo.

The projects sample rate has been set to 44100 and the bit depth is 24.

I would very much appriciate any help having spent several hours on this.

bg

[bgravato]

Any reason for using 'joint stereo' instead of 'stereo'?

Have you tried 16 bits depth?

If you import the mp3's back to audacity do they play in audacity?

Can you successfully play other mp3's in 24 bit depth in those apps?

I'm also moving this to the 1.3.x forum, since that's the version in question and not 1.2.x.

[gliss]

Thanks for your questions that made me thing and restart from scratch. With recording options (depth 16 bit and sample rate 16kbit/s fixed rate) untouched I exported with stereo set and could reproduce all the .mp3-files. I also could set the depth to 24 and listen to the music in audacity. Other apps I did not check.

However, once during that process I got a warning that mp3 support was not available. I believe this was while I was using amarok (in stopped mode) at the same time.
The list of output devices in audacity did not show my headphones (Intel HDA Stac92xx analog) but only Intel HDA Stac92xx digital. Of course I did not get output sound
on the .au file from audacity.

I restarted audacity and everything was fine.

Pragmatically, audacity works for me now, as I check while recording that the output device (I'm not using output for listening while recording) is set properly.
However, this puzzles me, as I had thought that output and input were seperate processes when used in different apps. Is this true?

Also, another question: audacity options seem to be general and not specific to an .au file. I guess it would be more comfortable if preferences were stored in the .au
file and would be project specific.

Thanks again, and I hope I was reasonably clear, Bernd

[bgravato]

There are many ways a program can open the sound devices. Depending on the program, the sound system, the sound drivers, etc... sometimes an app can be 'greedy' and 'lock' the sound device and prevent other apps form accessing it. Audio systems such as PulseAudio and JACK, among other things, solve this issue (and sometimes create others), by providing an extra layer between the apps and the alsa driver.

What may have happened is that some program could be running that was taking over the sound device and not letting other programs access it. Then when audacity was launched it couldn't access the 'analog' device for playback and so that option wasn't available on devices section.

Audacity only scans for available sound devices at startup, if another one becomes available while audacity is running it won't be detected, you need to restart audacity.

Also, another question: audacity options seem to be general and not specific to an .au file. I guess it would be more comfortable if preferences were stored in the .au
file and would be project specific.

I think you meant .aup not .au. Anyway yes audacity preferences are saved in ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg
The .aup file only has information relative to the project.

Which preferences do you think should be saved with the project which currently aren't?
You can always start a new topic in the Adding Features to Audacity section of this forum.

[gliss]

voila, I was able to reproduce the situation that got me confused:

start another app using the sound chip, e.g. amarok; listen to an mp3 file and put amarok to 'halt'.

start audacity with any good .au file: auidacity comes up without showing my computer's audio chip in the device list.

I suppose that continued use of audacity and exporting the 'good' .au file to mp3 got me in trouble. When using audacity
without the previous, everything is fine.

Bernd

[gliss]

thanks for your reply. It agrees with my (layman's) analysis. Evidently, amarok is very greedy!
yes, I menat .aup files and not .au files.

What would I like to see project specifically? For example all export options that I used when exporting the project specific .aup file.
This would have speeded up my error analysis, considerably. Of course, now that I know a little better how things work, it's not a
very urgent demand.

Bernd

[bgravato]

What would I like to see project specifically? For example all export options that I used when exporting the project specific .aup file.

Default (saved) export options are the last ones used. For example, if you export a project as 256kbps cbr mp3, the next time you export another project that's the options you'll get by default.