Podcasting

Audacity stereo file exports to 11khz

For those of you who have been following my podcasts, you will be aware that I recently switched from recording landline to landline to recording Skype calls and the audio quality of the podcasts increased markedly – or so I thought!

However, I received an email from a Margaret this morning which said:

I was wondering if you might be able to increase the Audio Sample Rate when you produce your next audio interview. The latest one with Mr. Ismail is done at 11kHz and my mp3 player won’t work properly unless it is at least 20 kHz. It sounds like really slow, drawn-out speech. The Bit Rate of 32kbps is fine but it’s the Audio Sample Rate (must be 20kHz or higher) that is critical.
Perhaps it is only my weird Creative Zen Micro that has this restrictive specification, in which case please disregard this email. I will make your mp3 into a wav file and then I can listen to it, no problem.
Thank you and this is only a suggestion. No reply is necessary.

I was curious about this – I hadn’t changed, in any way, how I exported the files to mp3 (Audacity: File -> Export to mp3) so what had changed? I checked the settings in Wiretap Pro and Skype – nothing obvious there. Then I go to thinking again.

The new process gets in a stereo file, whereas the landline to landline was mono. I tried converting the stereo file to mono in Audacity and exporting it and Bingo! 22050hz!

I uploaded the new 22khz files and replaced the existing ones for the Steve Rubel interview and the Salim Ismail chat of this morning.

Margaret – once again, thanks for taking the time and effort involved in pointing out this glitch to me – hopefully this makes these interviews even more accessible.

4 thoughts on “Audacity stereo file exports to 11khz”

  2. Shel,

    I am out of the country (Ireland) and away from my computer at the moment so forgive me if my instructions are a little off (I´ll be doing this from memory).

    What I do is – on the audio track there is a drop-down arrow – one of the options under it is to split the track, choose that. Then, delete one of the tracks (by clicking the x in the left hand corner of the track); finally, go to the drop-down again and choose the Mono option.

    There´s probably a far easier way in Audacity but this is the way I discovered and the one I have stuck to!

    Thanks for stopping by and commenting – by the way, I´d love to have you on the PodLeaders show sometime – would you be up for that?

  3. Another option is to split the stereo track (see above), set the left and right channels both to mono and then export to .wav (or MP3). Audacity will then mix the two channels.

    This method works great when there’s a difference between the left and right channel. When both channels contain the same sound, throwing one channel away (as described above) will do the trick, too,

    Bee

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