What is the best audio quality for Vegas 14? I used an output of 48,000hz and 16 bit, using apple earphones, but when I play it through any computer system, it just sounds off and low quality. The project files range from different type of quality, with that I mean different type of audio files. 

 

1. What render settings should I use?

2. Should I render audio only(because it has more options for quality than rendering video and audio at the same time) and then add it to the project?

 

Hopefully someone has some idea to fix this, thanks. 

First of all thanks, you are the only who has responded me in like 5 general forums of audio specified stuff.

1. Yes, standalone ranging from different file types.

2.and 3. understood

4 The destination is Youtube

If quality is a concern, you always want to render at the best quality which is normally an uncompressed WAV file. If your original audio is 48k at 16bit, then stay with that for your wav file. Use your speakers to mix or EQ your audio and then play it on as many different systems as you can (even your car radio) to determine a good neutral mix. Youtube will recompress it so you will always lose some quality. I don't think youtube takes audio only files, so you will need to render or mux with a video file. If the video is not important then just use a medium quality MP4 file.

There's no reason you can't render video and audio together with high quality audio settings. You can choose 16bit little Endian, which is basically the same as a WAV or AIFF......all are uncompressed audio. If you're rendering to .mov or .mp4, you should be able to choose an audio setting that's high quality. Even if you did choose an audio setting that was compressed (mp3, WMA/WMV, etc)..this would NOT necessarily be the reason for your apparent loss of quality after render.

So this begs the following question: does the audio of your rendered files sound the same as the timeline in Vegas when still listening on those earbuds? That will be the final clue to help you figure out what's really going on. Best of luck and post more info if you want here.

The 'Apple' headphones got nothing to do with it. Mixing skills take years to acquire, specifically for audio that sounds 'decent' on most playback setups, be it large, small, with/without subs headphones, TVs ect. Most pros have multiple sets of monitors to compare (and compromise), in a space with 'proper' acoustics.

Otherwise mix to a PCM format, which will be the best quality, and then make a MP3, MP4 or whatever from that, depending on the destination. Otherwise I agree with the other above comments.