Save As WAV and Edit Later?

[ngc1967]

Am I right in thinking that if I record an LP and export it to WAV (and maybe even save it to a CD) before I do any track separation or noise reduction etc. I will be able to import it again into Audacity at a later date (say six months time) and edit it or play around with track separation as if I had just recorded then and there?

In theory I can go through my whole LP collection and record each one (one after the other), save them as WAVs and then if I'm not happy with the quality or want to split them into individual tracks, I can edit them at a later date (ie the time consuming part).

The reason why I am enquiring is that I have brought my old turntable and 100+ LPs down from the loft and I don't really want to have them lying around in my living room for months and months.

I realize that you need a lot of hard disc space.

[kozikowski]

That's how I would do it. There is the faction that would like to capture at 48 KHz 32bit-floating to get the maximum quality and then, after the cutting and editing, convert back to the lower grade 44.1/16. You can do the whole thing at 44.1/16, but we need to keep in mind that serious audiophiles consider 44.1 inadequate as a final distribution format. Trying to capture, edit, and do effects in 44.1 and then prepare for a CD burn is laughable although you probably won't be able to tell the difference.

I can barely tell.

Koz

[ngc1967]

Thanks Kozikowski,

That gives me confidence in doing what I thought.

I'm not an audiophile and probably/definately would not be able to tell the difference between 48kHz and 44.1kHz and as for 32-bit floating - I was going to ask in another post what it is exactly that meant and how it compares to 16-bit (as every one usually recommends)

Regards,
Nigel (UK)

[kozikowski]

<<<32 bit floating.>>>

32-bit floating (whose real name is Single Precision Floating Point Value) is a much more accurate way to describe the translation from analog to digital. Straight 16 bit counts up from zero the same way you would count as if you were counting eggs. The problem is how to describe 2/3 of an egg. Floating Point easily gets around this by allowing you to move the decimal point to wherever it would do the most good. 0.67 in the above example. Floating Point in extreme form can accurately describe a negative value of zero if you had a burning desire to do that.

Cool! What's not to like?

Well, not all software packages like floating point, but we've all been using 16 bit since we were computing with sticks and rocks. So if you need to send a sound file to a Mystery Person, better make it 16 bit.

Since you're locally editing, you can probably do whatever you want.

Koz