I am a complete beginner when it comes to making digital, music, and the settings for the render to file thing are kind of confusing to me. How do bit depth and sample rate effect the wav file? What does the number of channels option do? Why does it render more than one file and what’s the difference between them? What’s a mixdown track? I am very confused.
Generally default settings are going to be fine. Bit rate is the amount of kilobits per second. An example is that CD is usually 1411kbps. MP3 usually from 128+kbps.
Bit depth is the amount of bits carried in each sample. CD quality will be 16.
Sample rate is the number of samples carried per second. Again 44100 is typical for CD quality music.
Therefore a typical export will be a bit depth of 16 with a sample rate of 44100
The higher these numbers get, the bigger the export (though I wouldn’t really have any reason to go above 44100).
I use Ableton, however, Audacity explains it quite well in their manual:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/sample_rates.html
Also
I haven’t noticed the rendering of more than one file - though maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
The mixdown is the mix of one or more audio tracks - eg. your audio and SynthV file (a combined file).
I however like to ditch the instrumental track, export vocals only and bring it into the DAW for further processing.
Basically, don’t worry too much. It sounds like you’re overthinking and maybe feeling a little overwhelmed. You ain’t gonna break anything. Play about with it and if you get stuck with anything, let us know.
The user manual is also really helpful:
「いいね！」 4
Thank you! This was very helpful. I think the mixdown track is the thing that was causing the multiple tracks thing I was referring to. I also think that when projects with multiple tracks are rendered the different tracks are in different files but I’m not quite sure.
「いいね！」 1