Exporting Audio Files in Audacity Simplified


You’re finally ready to share your file with mom or to send it off to the client for approval. But before you can deliver, you need to determine which audio format should use. 

WAV? AIFF? MP3? M4A?  When starting out, you can usualy use the default settings.

As shipped formats include WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and MP2.
You may install the optional FFmpeg library to export to many more audio formats including AC3, AMR(NB), M4A(AAC) including MP4 and WMA.
  

MP3 

 
Warning. Re-encoding to MP3

If you import an MP3 into Audacity, edit it then export it as an MP3, you will lose quality once in the original MP3 encoding of the imported audio, then again when you export it from Audacity as MP3. never do production work in MP3, instead work with a lossless format such as WAV, AIFF or FLAC and for final use then export to MP3.
 

Re Downloading Lame MP3 encoders because of copyrights

The software patent on LAME encoding library has expired, so now the LAME library for MP3 export is built-in with Audacity for Windows and Mac

 Audacity as shipped can import or export the following audio formats:

 

Most used encoding

  •  WAV or AIFF (universal support, lossless, best for CD burning)

If you want a perfect lossless copy of your audio, or to burn it in Apple Music/iTunes to an audio CD for playing on any CD player, you should choose WAV or AIFF. It is strongly recommended you export a standard "CD quality" 44100 Hz, 16-bit stereo WAV or AIFF to make sure Apple Music/iTunes understands the file. This means:
Ensure Project Rate at the bottom left of the Audacity project window is set to "44100" Hz.

  •  MP3 (universal support, small files, lossy)

If you want to distribute your files on the internet (for example as a podcast), you should choose MP3 as the Format in the Export dialog, as this is a space-saving (although slightly lossy) format that anyone should be able to play. 

The default MP3 encoding options in Audacity are 170 - 210 kbps VBR (preset "Standard"). While this is a good choice for stereo music, it is not generally recommended for Podcasts.
 

  • AAC (Apple proprietary, small files, lossy)

AAC is Apple's proprietary format which produces a lossy, slightly smaller file size than MP3 with approximately the same quality. To export AAC, download and install the FFmpeg library, 
To export choose M4A (AAC) Files (FFmpeg) in the Export Audio window then type the file name.

 

 Podcast settings

For Podcast, "CBR" (constant bit-rate) is recommended, and not "VBR" (variable bit-rate).

The choice of mono/stereo depends on the type of podcast. For voice only podcasts, mono is usually preferred as you can achieve better sound quality with less data. If the podcast contains a lot of music you may prefer to use stereo, but higher bit-rates will probably be required (bigger file size).
64 kbps CBR mono can give reasonable quality for voice if you are wanting to minimise the file size.
96 kbps CBR mono can give excellent quality for voice.
128 kbps CBR stereo can give reasonable quality where stereo is required.
192 kbps CBR stereo can give very good quality where stereo is required.
256 kbps VBR stereo can give excellent quality stereo music, though not recommended for streaming.MP3 vs. M4A

The majority of desktop and mobile devices sold nowadays come with native support for MP3 and M4A files alike.

For higher quality results, I recommend you choose M4A, which can offer higher sonic results at the same settings, all while still resulting in smaller file sizes than MP3. On the other hand, MP3 gives almost guaranteed compatibility i











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