PhatSunny · Why Audacity?
Batch mastering automation across entire folders. And the 32-bit float → 192kHz archival pipeline that takes Bitwig exports and turns them into masters that will outlive every delivery format we currently use.
Everyone underestimates Audacity. It's the free tool that ships on every Linux distribution, the one that gets called "basic" by people who haven't looked at it in ten years. Those people are wrong. Audacity has evolved into something genuinely powerful for specific mastering and post-production tasks that don't need a full DAW session.
In the PhatSunny workflow, Audacity does two things that nothing else does as cleanly. Both of them matter enormously.
Audacity's Macro system — formerly called Chains — allows you to build a processing pipeline and run it across an entire folder of audio files automatically. For mastering work, this is transformative.
Build a macro: normalize → apply compression settings → add mastering glue → export at target loudness. Point it at a folder of 20 client tracks. Walk away. Come back to 20 processed masters.
One macro, applied to every file in a directory. Compression, normalization, EQ, limiting — all automated across an entire album delivery without opening a single session.
Apply the same compression character and loudness target across all tracks of an album simultaneously. Consistency across an album in minutes, not hours.
Audacity's scripting interface allows even more complex automation — conditional processing, batch metadata editing, format conversion at scale.
LUFS metering, spectral analysis, clip detection — Audacity's analysis tools are genuinely useful for quality-checking a batch before delivery.
This is the workflow that most people don't know about, and it's one of the most significant quality advantages in the PhatSunny mastering process.
Bitwig Studio records and processes internally in 32-bit float. This is exceptional — 32-bit float has an enormous dynamic range, essentially eliminating internal clipping during processing. When you export from Bitwig, you can export a 32-bit float WAV file that captures every bit of that internal headroom.
"Most engineers export at 24-bit and call it done. The 32-bit float export from Bitwig, brought into Audacity and re-exported at 192kHz 32-bit WAV, gives you a master with more headroom and resolution than anything going to CD ever required. It's future-proofing your work."
The Audacity step: import the 32-bit float WAV from Bitwig. Use Audacity's high-quality resampling to upscale to 192kHz sample rate. Export as 32-bit float WAV at 192kHz. The result is a master file with more temporal resolution than any standard delivery format — a true archival master that can be downsampled to any target format without quality loss.
Bitwig's internal engine captures full 32-bit float headroom. Export at 32-bit float WAV to preserve every digit of that internal precision.
High-quality resampling in Audacity takes the 44.1 or 48kHz Bitwig export and upsamples it to 192kHz — maximum temporal resolution for the archival master.
The final file: 32-bit float WAV at 192kHz. When streaming platforms eventually increase their quality ceilings, this master is already there waiting.
From the 192kHz master, generate 24/48 for streaming, 16/44.1 for CD, 320kbps MP3 for immediate distribution — all from one archival source of truth.
Bitwig is the composition and mixing environment. Audacity is the post-processing and archiving tool. They do different things, and they do their respective things better than either could do the other's job. Audacity's batch macro system has no equivalent in Bitwig. The high-quality upscaling pipeline, run automatically across a folder of files, is a capability that saves hours per album delivery.
Bitwig exports 32-bit float WAV → Audacity upscales to 192kHz → archival master delivered. The last step before the client gets the file.
Bitwig composition → CLAP plugins → Audacity batch mastering → 32-bit / 192kHz archival master. The full Linux audio pipeline.