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Audacity: Export as MP3

Audacity: Export as MP3

You use DAWs and the recording hardware to essentially produce one thing: a digital audio file or set of files that has your, and your participants' voices coming through loud and clear.  In DAWs such as Audacity and GarageBand, you save a project, not a finished file.  That project may combine several files (your voice recording, and perhaps intro music or other audio clips.)  You Export the finished file that is the file you upload to the web.  An excellent format for this is mp3, which is a good balance of size (compression) and quality. See Audacity’s Support Article on Exporting for more detailed instructions.

1

When we are done editing our audio and ready to export it, click on File in the upper-left.

OR use CTRL+SHIFT+E/CMD+SHIFT+E and skip to step 3.

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2

Click on Export Audio…

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3

In the pop-up that appears, select Export to computer.

If we want, we can also click the checkbox to the left of Don’t show again in the bottom-left. This will have Audacity remember our selection and now show this pop-up again.

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4

Give the file an appropriate name.

If we saved the project, by default the name of the project will be in the file name. If we have yet to save the project “untitled” is the default name.

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5

Click on Browse… to choose a location to save to.

If we save the project, the default Folder will be the same folder we saved the project.

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6

Next, we select the format.

MP3 is typically a good option, but Audacity recommends either Opus or M4a, which deliver better quality audio with similar file compression to MP3 (Audacity Team, 2024)

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7

For the rest, the defaults are fine.

Click on Export in the lower-right.

Audacity recommends using the Mono option if we just recorded ourselves. This will make the file somewhat smaller, but does not affect the overall recording quality (Audacity Team, 2024)

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Citations

Audacity Team. (2024, April 22). Saving and exporting projects | Audacity Support. Audacity Support. https://support.audacityteam.org/basics/saving-and-exporting-projects

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