Can small dropouts due to connections issues on phone interview be fixed?

I’m using Audacity 3.1.3 on Windows 10, and I’d like to edit a MP3 file (about 30 minutes). I did an interview with an author via cell phone, and unfortunately there are a few connection issues. It’s not horrible, just a bit annoying when it drops out several times on my side of the interview.

Can small dropouts due to connections issues on a phone interview be fixed in Audacity? Is there some kind of smoothing function?

Or any feedback or suggestions?

KEL

a bit annoying when it drops out several times on my side of the interview.

Oh, that’s a snap. I thought you were going to say the guest’s voice dropped out and they were just stepping on a jet to Gibraltar and weren’t going to be available again for months.

Re-record your sentences. I’m not kidding. That’s a very Hollywood thing to do if a field shoot doesn’t go well.

There’s some tricks to it. Recreate exactly the conditions you were in and record in whole sentences. There is no patching the single word, “environment,” but you can much more easily slide a whole new sentence in there:

"Did you have any trouble with the environment at your new job?

Buy the way, this is a shining reason why you never interrupt an interview.

Koz

I’d like to edit a MP3 file

That could be a problem. You can’t edit an MP3 and save corrections without the sound quality going down.

Audacity doesn’t edit MP3. It converts your MP3 into its own perfect internal sound format and then makes a whole new MP3 when you’re done. Even if you choose the same quality value you did for the first file, the second file is going to have a summation of the two MP3 compression damages.

You can work around this by making the first file or recording as Perfect Quality WAV and not MP3. Make the MP3 after you’re done editing and the WAV quality is perfect.

You can make the corrected MP3 at a much higher quality than the original. That works but the file size goes up, which everybody hates.

Stop using Audacity. There are MP3 editors that can perform simple corrections directly on the MP3 file and don’t have this multi-pass problem.

Koz