Audacity Forum

Hello,

i am creating some effects chains with Audacity 1.3.7. SaveHQMaster 1 and 2 are showing up as effects, and are being used by the present chains presets, but i can find no explanation of what it is these things do. I am doing some basic batch-manipulation of wav files, and want to find the simplest way to simply do the processing and then update the files with the changes. Do I in this case have to "Export2WAV" or is there some simpler way to just "save" the file before loading the next? I realize there shouldnt be any degradation in quality by loading a WAV file and then exporting to WAV again (since no conversion should have to be done), but I just want to make sure that by using the export function my files arent passed through the internal Audacity mixer once unnecessarily. Any help / insight is much appreciated.

Regards,
-Rob.

"SaveHqMaster2" does not seem to be documented anywhere, but I think it is to do with the "CleanSpeech Mode".
CleanSpeech Mode is customisation of Audacity by Lynn Allan with limited menu options. It's mainly used for quick clean-up and MP3 export of a number of speech recordings, carried out as a batch process.
There is a bit of information about CleanSpeech mode here:
http://audacityteam.org/manual/index.ph ... references

So to cut a long answer short, no you do not want to use "SaveHqMaster2" as this will export as an MP3. Use "Export WAV" instead.

You do not need to use an "Import" step in your batch, as when you apply the chain to files, the files are automatically imported for processing (the "Import" command is not actually implemented for chains), but you do need to use an Export command so that Audacity knows whether to export as WAV, or some other format.

Note that batch processing in Audacity is still quite rudimentary, so do not expect to have the full power of Audacity available through chain commands.

Thanks for the info. Looks like I'll stay away from the SaveHQMaster things, whatever they are. Would still be nice to know whether an Export2Wav will pass the project/file through Audacity's mixing engine or whether the program recognizes that the source material is in WAV and thus skips this step (the way that a traditional audio editor would/should..?). Anyone from the development team on that one?

I think what your asking is "does any "resampling" take place. The answer to that is, if the audio is a 32 bit wav file, and is exported as a 32 bit wav file, then it does not get resampled. In all other cases it does, however, the losses involved when, for example, dealing with 16 bit audio, are extremely small (inaudible).

thanks again steve.