Export file types

Are you an audio protocol novice? Don’t worry – here’s a rundown of the most vital types of audio you can export from Audacity, and their implications.

WAV is a hyper-realistic representation of a piece of audio, with every single point in the waveform recreated at the highest possible resolution. AIFF is Apple’s version of Windows’ WAV. There’s no practical difference between them – the same data; a different way of storing it. Both of these hi-res formats will churn out a huge file size, and so…

How about a FLAC file? These are still lossless, but the compression used only acts on the file itself. It could, for example, make a seconds-long stretch of six million zeros into a command that says “there are six million zeros now.” It’s much more efficient for certain material. But not every destination will play a FLAC file, and besides, it’s still pretty big. Too big for many applications…

If you need a smaller file size, an OGG or an MP3 should work just fine for almost all applications. OGG was originally one of your best bets for Audacity export, but only because Audacity couldn’t churn out an MP3. Fortunately, MP3’s patents recently expired, so new versions of Audacity offer the format. Despite their rough rep, modern MP3s stand up pretty well for casual uses, unless you’re going to be editing the file further after export. You can also specify an MP3 encoding quality to trade off against file size.