Audacity Forum

Hi,

I am new to the forums here.....hope I'm following all procedures but apologies if not.

Very straightforward question I think. Like, I suspect, a lot of users on this forum, I am a keen audiophile, so recording quality is important to me.

I use Audacity mainly to make the type of changes which do NOT manipulate the actual waveform envelope - eg cutting out unwanted sections of audio and splitting one long track into segments. I am interested to know if there is any quality fall-off by doing this.

If I simply open a WAV file, chop a section out of it, then export it (again as a WAV file), does Audacity leave the uncut section alone, or would it be resampled? Put another way, if you were to recursively open a file, cut a portion out, export it, open it again, cut another portion out, export it etc, over and over, would there be a gradual degredation in quality or would the final remaining portion be digitally unaltered from the original?

Thanks

If the sample rate and bit depth is kept the same throughout, then simple editing such as cutting and splitting will be lossless. This means that if you are working with 16 bit/44100Hz files your entire project should be done at 16bit 44100Hz - see the default settings in the "Quality" tab of Audacity Preferences (Edit menu > Preferences).

For more complex editing, such as amplifying, fades, noise reduction.... you should set your tracks to 32 bit - although there will then be some resampling going on the overall quality will be better than using 16 bit.