Audacity - Export, Normalize, and Compress Your Final Track

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We'll be using a free audio editor in this lesson called Audacity. When you are ready to export to mp3 make sure you download the lame encoder. It literally takes seconds and is simple to setup. If you have any problems please let us know.

Exporting out of Soundation can be slightly tricky. If you have reverb or delay tails at the end of your tracks you'll want to add an extra clip at the end of your arrangement to guarantee nothing gets cut off. From there we can load our track into audacity, normalize it, cut any silence, add fades, etc. Once you listen back to your track one final time to make sure it's what you want you can then bounce it down to an mp3 file.

This is not a lesson on lossy vs lossless file compression in anyway. But if you are curious mp3 is a lossy type of file compression. This just means that actual parts of your audio signal (that the algorithm deems unnecessary) will be removed and therefore you end up with a much smaller file. In my opinion the difference between a 320 kbps mp3 and an original wav file is usually not very noticeable. In some cases the difference can be audible, in such times I've gone back and changed the tonal balance of the wav file to anticipate what the mp3 conversion is taking out. If you are new to making music I wouldn't recommend this because it's easy to do more harm than good. Even if you do notice a difference it's important to ask the question will my listener know or care? For the majority of people that answer is no. If you want to keep the wav file and upload it in other locations feel free to do so. Due to server limitations we only accept mp3.