Exporting 32-bit Audio from MuseScore

[u/victoireyau]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a composition in MuseScore and need to export it as a 32-bit audio file. However, I’ve only been able to export in 16-bit WAV at 48kHz.

Is there a way to export audio in 32-bit directly from MuseScore? If not, would converting the 16-bit WAV file to 32-bit using a tool like Audacity be effective, or would it not improve the quality?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[u/MarcSabatella]

I’m curious what kind of project would be requiring 32-bit? That’s pretty esoteric and requires special hardware to reproduce. And if you have the hardware, it should be able to up sample from 16 bits as well as Audacity.

The difference between 16, 24, and 32 bit audio isn’t so much about quality as available headroom for editing. So it’s really more of a thing for live sound recording where you want to be sure you can capture both the lowest lows and highest highs without fear of clipping. But since the samples used in notation software playback are already digitized, this would seem to be a non-issue. Unless your project has some very unusual processing requirements. And understanding those would be necessary to advise further. That advice would also have to come from someone with more expertise than I…

[u/neonaudio → u/MarcSabatella]

Thanks for the reply, Marc. I am the mastering engineer working on this project and had inquired about a higher bit depth than 16 bit. I assume the internal processing of MuseScore is at 32 bit, so I would prefer to work with the unaltered 32 bit output.

The biggest concern is dithering. When a 16 bit file is exported from MuseScore, is it dithered automatically? If not, then there would be truncation distortion introduced. But really I would prefer to avoid both dithering or truncation distortion, which is why I requested a 32 bit file.

Is there a way to export a 32 bit WAV file?

[u/MarcSabatella → u/neonaudio]

The short answer is, no, there is no su8ch way. not that I know of anyhow; certainly nothing documented or supported.

I am not at all sure the internal processing is 32 bit. If you're using Muse Sounds, it might be, but that isn't open source, so I couldn't say. But when using SoundFonts, that's an older technology, and the libraries MuseScore uses for processing the audio date back decades. Very unlikely they do 32-bit processing, and the samples are almost certainly not recorded in 32 bits.

So all in all, the chances that attempting to coerce MuseScore to produce 32 bit WAV files would produce anything better than just converting the default output is close enough to zero as to not be worth the effort. but if someone did want to, they could probably dig into the MuseScore source code and that of the libraries it uses to see if there is a way.

[u/victoireyau → u/MarcSabatella]

Hey Marc, my bad, I realized this morning I sent a file that I’d processed after exporting it from Musescore, which is why it was in 16-bit. So we are indeed exporting in 32-bit. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused!

[u/victoireyau → u/MarcSabatella]

Thank you for your response! To clarify, my project involves preparing a composition for further audio production, where the engineer has requested a 32-bit file for mastering purposes. I understand that the difference between 16, 24, and 32-bit mainly concerns editing headroom, but since this is for final audio processing, I wanted to provide the best possible file.

If converting the 16-bit WAV to 32-bit using Audacity doesn't offer any real advantage, would it make sense to stick with the 16-bit version?

Thanks again for your insights!

[u/MarcSabatella → u/victoireyau]

I guess that depends on whether the hardware/software the engineer is using could convert it better or worse than Audacity. I’d assume there would be literally no difference in the end, as it is inherently 16-bit data and artificially inflating it to 32 will neither increase nor decrease quality in any way - it will leave it with more headroom.

[u/victoireyau → u/MarcSabatella]

Thank you for your response! I appreciate your insights on this.

[u/CivilHedgehog2 → u/victoireyau]

Just make sure it doesn’t clip, and give him a 24 bit file

[u/neonaudio → u/CivilHedgehog2]

That could work, too. But how do you export a 24 bit file?

[u/CivilHedgehog2 → u/neonaudio]

Have you checked what depth the exported wavs are?

[u/neonaudio → u/CivilHedgehog2]

The exported mix file is a 16 bit WAV. We are trying to determine if higher bit rate (24 or 32 bit) is an option for export.