Lesson 8

8. How to Export WAV and MP3 Files

Resource Type:

Tutorial Video

Duration:

5 minutes

Outcomes:

Learners are expected to:

SO 2.3. save an Audacity project

SO 2.7. export an Audacity project as a WAV file

SO 2.8. export an Audacity project as an MP3 file

SO 2.9.            demonstrate an understanding of the difference between an Audacity project and an audio file, such as an MP3 or WAV file

SO 2.10.          differentiate between a compressed audio file and an uncompressed audio file

Suggested Evaluation:

Learners can be evaluated through the completion of the following activities:

My First Recording

Make Your Voice Sound Like a Chipmunk

Multitrack Recording in Audacity

How to Mess Up a Piece of Music

Halloween Soundscape

Interview a Superhero

Radio Play

Instructors may choose to observe learners complete these tasks as the evaluation method.

Procedure:

In this tutorial you will learn how to export an audio file (MP3 and WAV) using Audacity.

It is good practice to regularly save your work when using Audacity. The best way to do this is to go to Audacity's FILE menu and select SAVE PROJECT. A project will save all your sound, slider settings, track data and other information about your project.

While Audacity project files are great while you are working on your audio, these files are not very versatile. Project files are not designed to be put on an audio CD, emailed, placed on a website, etc. When you have finished your project and you are ready to use your completed audio you will need to export your sound file, such as a WAV or MP3 file.

Before you learn how to export WAV and MP3 files, here is a little information on these two sound formats. An MP3 file is a compress file format. This means that in order to make the file small enough to send through the Internet a great deal of sound data is deleted. For example, very high sounds and low sounds, which are outside the range that humans can hear, are deleted. Other aspects of the sound file are also changed to make the file smaller. Due to this compression the quality of an MP3 file is quite low when compared to the original recording.

WAV files are uncompressed sound files. This means that a WAV file sound exactly the same as the original recording. The tradeoff is that WAV files are very large. In some cases, a typical WAV file will be 10 times larger than an MP3 of the same recording. 

Follow these steps to export WAV and MP3 files:

- Open an Audacity project

- In Audacity go to the FILE menu and choose EXPORT

- Give your new file a name

- In the FORMAT pull-down menu choose the file format you wish to create (for this tutorial we are using WAV or MP3)

- Click SAVE

If you choose MP3 you can also click the OPTIONS button to adjust the settings of your MP3. When you are in the OPTIONS window you can experiment with the QUALITY (the MP3's bit rate) pull-down menu. A low bit rate (64kbps) will produce a low quality sounding MP3 with a very small file size. A high bit rate (320kbps) will produce a good quality MP3 with a much larger file size. Experiment with these setting to find out what works best for you.