I’ve been trying to use Audacity, a few audio editing program, lately to edit my podcast. I had been doing all of the editing with Adobe Audition at work, but really wanted to just do it from the comfort of my own office chair.
It’s a pretty nice program and you can’t really argue with the price. One thing I was frustrated with though is some of my audio clips were sounding all warbly and degraded after I exported my project as an MP3. I finally figured out what was happening. Most of my clips were recorded in mono. A couple of clips I imported were stereo. After I split those stereo tracks and deleted a channel, then the warbling disappeared. Another thing I was playing around with was the bit-rate and sample rate. That can also make a difference, but definitely split your stereo tracks into mono if you’re doing multi-track editing.
You were probably hearing some kind of artifact from the channels being out of phase.
Did you record in stereo or mono? Either you’re duplicating info on both tracks and it’s canceling out when you create the stereo image, or your two mics are catching the same thing, but at different distances. So, you’re catching a peripheral bit of the audio with a slight delay from the mic that was further from the source. I’m no audio engineer, so I can’t say for sure. I’m also probably using the wrong terms to describe it.
The audio I recorded was mono on an Olympus MP3 recorder. The clips giving me issues were from a pre-existing mp3s - clips I had taken from songs.
This was also happening with several projects I was doing. So I assumed it was just an issue with combining mono and stereo tracks.