Audio Recording

When you are working with high resolution audio such as in 24 or 32 bit, there is a need to save it at a lossless format, so that the overall audio quality will be preserved.

Lossless format means that there is NO downgrading of bit depth. So this means that if you have a 32 bit audio and export it as 32 bit audio wav file, it is considered lossless.

However if you need to export a 32 bit audio to a 16 bit audio format, there is a loss in the process. The loss is the resolution or the quality of audio, although you will not noticed it normal hi-fi systems. This loss can be noticeable if you are willing to serious digital processing on the resulting audio (16 bit format). It is why mastering engineers will always work on the highest audio resolution as possible.

In Audacity, you can work with a 24 bit audio as a 32 bit float resolution. One of the problem common for beginners is that if that if you have recorded audio in 24/32 bit resolution and you need to export it as 32 bit audio, this is not a clear and easy process.

The following are the steps:

1.)Go to File → Export.
2.)You can put details under “Edit Metadata” and click OK.
3.)Since you are planning to save it as a lossless format (32-bit WAV audio), select “Other Uncompressed files”.
4.) Then click “Options”. Under “Specify Uncompresed Options” Select:

“WAV(Microsoft)” under “Header” and “32 bit float” under “Encoding”, click “OK”.

5.) Finally, click save. Audacity will then save the audio as a lossless format. If you save it to your Desktop; then you can find the audio there.

However, what if you are working with a 32 bit audio and decide to save it as 16 bit format? This is not anymore a lossless audio format and the quality will be downgraded.

For best results, you need to enable “dithering”.Dithering works by replacing the lost bits with noise so that a 16 bit audio still sounds like a 32 bit audio. These noise is called as the dithering noise.

If you will not use dithering when exporting a high resolution audio (example 24 or 32 bits) , it will not sound good. So how you can be sure that dithering will be enabled in Audacity?

The good thing is that Audacity enables dithering by default. To double check, you can:
1.) Launch Audacity.
2.) Go to Edit – Preferences and then click Quality tab.

The important is to set Dither to “Shaped”. This is the Dithering noise shaping settings. The default setting is set to “Shaped”.