Oh my gosh Charlie!! Don't give me so much credit. I don't know anything more about the Zoom H1 and Audacity than I do about BIAB, honest. At this point I can do more in BIAB. I've certainly studied it more.

Woke up with a good feeling today, and so I went back to my song, turned off the reverb on the piano and violins (it was left over from the lower-quality patches; HQ patches don't need it, lesson learned), turned the volume down on almost everything, worked on the arrangement some--have NO idea why the rests don't take on the loop; the track's not frozen--but anyway, I just rendered the MP3 and the noise is almost completely gone!!! I didn't even get as far as unplugging the speakers like Mario suggested! And I think maybe what I pick up as low-level noise in this new MP3 might be just a natural piano sound. It's NOTHING like yesterday; zero static! Zero distortion!

Ended up subbing piano 890 in the RT, and not only is the sound lovely and clean, the style fits my song way better, so that's a bonus--I'm thinking about oldmuso and his "golden nuggets" in styles you just don't expect.

Mario, I could very well have a defective computer, although it's brand new so that would be truly frustrating. What I'm thinking now is that maybe I'm just so inexperienced at mixing that I inadvertently set myself up for noise from the interactions among volume, patches, and reverb. It still doesn't sound clean to me, doesn't sound professional to me--but it has a great beat and it makes me dance in my chair.

What I don't know is how to get it so y'all can listen to it. I tried Soundcloud but the private link wouldn't share. Oh well. One thing at a time, right?

Love is always worth the risk.

HP laptop; Windows 10 Home 64 bit; core i5; 2.40 Ghz; 8 GB RAM; 256 GB hard drive; BIAB 2021 Build 835.