Saving the Audacity Project vs. Exporting as WAV or Exporting as MP3

Saving the Project is not the same as Exporting as WAV or MP3.

Saving the Project is necessary if you want to continue editing your project later since it has all the information about how you arranged or trimmed the individual audio tracks on the Audacity timeline. There are a few things that you need to be aware of concerning saving Audacity Projects. While the explanation below is lengthy, it's really important that you read it and understand it completely in order to be able to reopen your project after closing it:

• When you save your project you will give it a filename. This file will have an .aup extension, for example: myproject.aup, and can only be opened in Audacity. More importantly, when you save your project, a folder called "filename_data", for example: myproject_data, will automatically be created. This folder contains copies of all of the "edited" audio files and is essential to have with your project file, myproject.aup, in order to reopen your Audacity project. Without this folder, you will not be able to edit your project in the future.
• While editing, you can save the project file directly to your USB Jump Drive, but the "filename_data" folder will contain copies of all of the audio clips and can get REALLY HUGE! while you're working on your project. For this reason it might be best to save your project to the computer's hard drive to avoid running out of space on your Jump Drive. Then, after finishing your editing session and closing Audacity, the size of the files in the filename_data folder is greatly reduced so, at this point, you can transfer the project file (the one with the .aup extension AND THE "filename_data" FOLDER to your Jump Drive.
• Finally, you should know that the "original audio files", like music, sound effects, etc. if edited, shortened in length, etc. will not be part of the audio files stored in the "filename_data" folder. If you think that you may need to have the entire music file (unedited) or other unedited versions of audio files for a future editing session, you should make sure that you have a copy of these UNEDITED AUDIO FILES saved on your jump drive.

Exporting as WAV or Exporting as MP3 mixes together all of the tracks in an Audacity Project to create a single audio file that can be played on any computer using a media player or burned to an audio CD.

Audio files saved using Export as will have the appropriate extension added to them. For example: myproject.wav or myproject.mp3 These files can be burned to a CD as either data (only playable on a computer) or as CD Audio that can be played on a typical Audio CD player.

For most applications, you should choose Export as MP3 since MP3 format audio files are almost 1/10th the size of WAV files.