Re: A stupid problem that I'm facing in GoldWave, can you read and help?
That sounds like a very odd problem, though without hearing exactly what it sounds like, I can't really guess what's going on. Often a problem like that is easier to identify if I can hear it happening.
I'll attempt to explain why it's a bad idea to save as mp3 or ogg, though as I said I'm not really sure if that's the real problem here. Still I will try to explain it. If you want to upload a sample of what your low quality audio sounds like, I'll have a look at it.
The advice I think I'm going to give you for now is, if you want to save a work in progress, either save in wav or flac formats. Saving in wav allows for fast saving and loading times, since nothing has to be compressed and decompressed. Saving and opening flac is slower, because the file has to be compressed to fit into a smaller file, but the quality is still the same, even if you compress and decompress it a thousand times. That's why it's called lossless c
ompression.
Never, ever save in mp3, ogg, or any other format which is not lossless, until you're sure you've finished the project. I'd also recommend keeping a backup of your finished work in flac so that you have a lossless copy.
In any case, saving in mp3, ogg, or whatever, is going to degrade quality, especially if you keep compressing and decompressing it to add new content. Let's use a really weird analogy to describe this. Please don't laugh, it was the best I could come up with.
Imagine you're making a microwave meal, which you have kept in the fridge. This is analogous to having an unfinished audio project open in Gold Wave or another audio editor. You take the food (or the audio project), out of the fridge (or out of your audio editor), and put it in the microwave (or save it to ogg or mp3). Obviously, putting food into the microwave is going to change it a little bit, it'll probably dry it out especially if you let too muc
h steam escape. It's not going to be just a hotter version of what was in your fridge, since small reactions are taking place.
So the food is done cooking, and you sit down at the table to eat it, but get distracted, so forget about the food. Then someone, maybe you, comes along later and sees the food sitting there, and picks it back up and puts it back into the fridge. In our analogy, this is equivalent to taking that mp3 or ogg file, and putting it back in our audio editor, which is something you never want to do. Because putting something that's been microwaved back into the fridge means that you're likely going to microwave it again, which would make the food drier and change its taste further. After a few runs of that, the food may taste so bad that you wouldn't want to eat it.
Now, that analogy was not meant to suggest that the microwave is a bad thing, or that using formats like mp3 or ogg is a bad thing. It's just meant to explain why usin
g them multiple times is a bad thing. They are known as lossy. They remove information which they think we cannot hear, which degrades sound quality a little. This is a little bit like how a microwave can dry out food a little, but leave it quite edible in the end. However, you're not meant to do it more than once. So, if you keep compressing, decompressing, modifying and recompressing an audio file, after a few runs of that, it's going to sound noticeably worse, and will keep getting worse the longer you repeat the process. With most formats, any more than about 3 or 4 runs through will result in some noticeable degradation in sound quality.
If you're really interested to hear how things break, I think it would be easy, in theory, to make a batch script to automatically do this. I think at one point I even found a script that was already made for that purpose, though I didn't download it. I'll have to look again for it.
Anyway, that has nothing to
do with this topic.
I hope this information made sense and that it helps you out, though as I said, I can't really be sure what's going on.
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