Huge Audacity files

kri · Post by **kri** » March 6th, 2006, 10:04 am

I just recently had to delete all of my Audacity originals, because they were taking up WAY too much space. With almost 40 recordings, my "Audacity Originals" folder was just about 7GB large. Now, this isn't a problem with 111GB to use on my hard drive, except we're having to slim things down. We're using a LOT of our available space...so, bye bye ridiculously huge Audacity files. Perhaps I should save up some day to buy an audio editor. I love open source, but it is not the end all solution.

marlodianne · Post by **marlodianne** » March 6th, 2006, 10:26 am

Kri, how the heck are yours only 7 gigs?? I can get 3 gigs, easy, for a single chapter! Once, I actually ran out of hard drive while recording!

What I do, is keep the audacity for just as long as I'm recording / editing and the second I export to wav, I toast the audacity files. Wavs are uncompressed, so if I ever need to reedit or make a different mp3 encode (I have friends on dialup who ask me to make realistically sized encodes that they can actually download

), I still have a source file. When I archive to disc, I backup the wav, mp3, and book text together.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » March 6th, 2006, 10:26 am

if you wanted to save your original recordings forever and ever (just in case they ever needed to be edited), you could export them as WAV files which would take up less space than the Audacity files, but also allow you to edit them without quality loss.

EDIT: .. yea, what she said

kri · Post by **kri** » March 6th, 2006, 10:29 am

Thanks Marlo and Betsie

I actually thought about exporting them all to WAVs, but the thought of exporting all those was daunting. Now that you mention it though, I regret not doing it. When I deleted the folder, it was too large for the recycle bin to catch it. They're permanently deleted now! But it freed up about 15% of my hard drive (I think), so this is a good thing.

Perhaps I'll make it a habit to export to WAV after I export to MP3 when I'm done.

HerrSchildkroete · Post by **HerrSchildkroete** » March 6th, 2006, 10:58 am

Well, in theory you loose quality by exporting to wav. This has to do with the sample size which is 16bit in wav files and 32bit in audacity. That's why you would expect the resulting wav file to be half as large as the audacity data.

In practice the difference probably won't be notable, since most soundcards can't record at more than 16bit.

HerrSchildkroete · Post by **HerrSchildkroete** » March 6th, 2006, 11:01 am

I forgot that the above is only true if you use standard settings. It is possible to create wav files with 32bit sample size, but usually the audacity wav export creates 16bit files....

marlodianne · Post by **marlodianne** » March 6th, 2006, 11:22 am

Actually the standard settings in audacity are also for 16bit audio. Although you can change that, it is generally not recommended, since that can play havoc on systems.

HerrSchildkroete · Post by **HerrSchildkroete** » March 6th, 2006, 11:29 am

Oh OK - on my system it was 32Bit by default ... Strange that.