Sound File Formats

Audacity Project format (AUP)

 Audacity projects are stored in an AUP file, which is a format that has been highly optimized for Audacity so that it can open and save projects quickly. In order to achieve this speed, Audacity breaks larger audio files into several smaller pieces and stores these pieces in a directory with a similar name as the project. For example, if you name a project "chanson", then Audacity will create a project file called chanson.aup to store the general information about your project, and it will store your audio in several files inside a directory called chanson_data. While the Audacity Project format is based on XML and is meant to be open, it is not currently compatible with any other audio programs, so when you are finished working on a project and you want to be able to edit the audio in another program, select Export from the File Menu.

WAV (Windows Wave format)

This is the default uncompressed audio format on Windows, and is supported on almost all computer systems. Audacity can read and write this format. People working with multichannel audio at very high quality settings, or with very long recordings, should note that the maximum size of a wav file is 2GB.

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)

This is the default uncompressed audio format on the Macintosh, and it is supported by most computer systems, but it is not quite as common as the WAV format. Audacity can read and write this format.

Sun Au / NeXT

This is the default audio format on Sun and NeXT computers, and usually u-law compressed, so it is not a very high quality format. U-law compression is a very simple, fast but low quality way to reduce the size of the audio by about 50%. This format was one of the first audio formats supported by Web browsers, and it is still often used for short sound effects where quality is not as important.
Audacity exports both 8-bit u-law files, and 16-bit uncompressed files, which are the same quality as wav or aiff files.

MP3 (MPEG I, Layer 3)

This is a compressed audio format that is a very popular way to store music. It can compress audio by a factor of 10:1 with very little degradation in quality. Audacity can both import and export this format. For more information on how to export MP3 files from within Audacity, see Exporting MP3 Files.

Ogg Vorbis

This compressed audio format was designed to be a free alternative to MP3. Ogg Vorbis files are not as common, but they are about the same size as MP3 with better quality to rival AAC or WMA. Audacity can import and export this format.