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I assume with “silence” the most significant byte will be zero, or at least it should be a small number. Have you looked at the file with a hex editor? That can be kind-of tough with acoustic signals but there might be a clue with loud & quiet sounds. Something could be configured wrong if you’re only using one microphone… I’ve never used I2S but I took a quick look at the datasheet and I saw something about stereo. Otherwise, PCM data is pretty straightforward. I assume you’ve experimented with the byte order and offset? With 24-bits the offset can be 0, 1 or, 2 so you can try all of the possibilities.
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If I change the encoding type, it doesn’t appear to change anything in the audio when it plays-back. Then again in that box at the top, if I press the right drop-down arrow next to the filename and scroll down to the FORMAT option, it does show that 32-bit float is selected although that’s not what I selected when I imported the file. It seems that regardless of the one encoding type I chose, after I click IMPORT, the waveform appears and in the left-hand box with the “Mute” and “Solo” buttons left of the waveform, at the bottom of that box above the “Select” button, it always shows 32-bit float. When importing raw data, if I click FILE > IMPORT > RAW DATA then select my file and then from the “Import raw data” box, I chose the encoding (and other parameters). I was using an older version and the reason I upgraded to the newer version is because I thought there was a bug in the old version but it appears to behave the same in the new version: Started using a the latest version of Audacity a few days ago.
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