It appears destructive effects, like normalize or compressor, have a higher chance of breaking the file and make for less of an interesting effect, so its usually a good idea to choose a constructive effect. Once the stretch of audio is highlighted, select the effect menu and choose one from the list. Instead leave out the outermost 10% of each end of the file this usually provides a good effect while leaving the file intact, although this can vary, especially with bigger files, so it may be a matter of trial and error. The way most picture viewers read picture files is to look at the data encoded at the beginning and end of the file, so adding effects to these will usually “break” the file, making it unreadable. The next step is to apply audio effects to this data, but selecting which bit is quite important. Click import and you should have the raw data represented as an audio file, not one that you’ll enjoy listening to, but a usable one non the less. Selecting what I have from the drop down menus should provide suitable settings, although it shouldn’t matter what you select, as long as you remember it for when you export the file once you’re done.

Opening up Audacity and selecting the “Import, RAW Data…” options from the File menu gives you the following screen.

In this post I’ll be focusing on pictures and videos, namely how the effect is achieved and what can be created with this technique.įor this instance I will use this tasteful selfie I took whilst mountain biking specifically for this purpose.Īudacity is a widely used DAW (digital audio workstation) that is free to download and makes it easy to import any kind of media file, be it audio or not. Datamoshing, also known as glitching or databending, is a type audiovisual effect that relies on “broken” or augmented files of originally clean media.

Datamoshing videos