Corrupted files?

I made 3 files Friday and exported them as WAV files to my spample folder on my desktop. I also saved them as on Audacity. They all played fine on Saturday.But now two of the three files are coming back as noise when I try to import them to audacity. I made these files on Windows XP and Audacity was installed using .exe installer

They all played fine on Saturday.

In Windows Media?
Koz

They played fine then they came back as noise through windows media and audacity

anyone got any ideas why?

They played fine then they came back as noise through windows media and audacity

No, I mean you tried them in Windows Media right after you made them and they sounded OK?
Koz

Describe the noise. HIss, hash, garbled garbage, tight high squeek. Terrific distortion? Any parts of the original show recognizable at all? Koz

“No, I mean you tried them in Windows Media right after you made them and they sounded OK?”
Yes. Right after I made them I tried them in windows media and everything sounded good. What I’m getting now is noise which just sounds like a quick hiss and no parts of the oiginal are recognizable.

That was the wrong answer. !@#$. I don’t know what could do that. I’m going straight for virus damage or other exotic problems that could damage sound files over time.

What I’m getting now is noise which just sounds like a quick hiss and no parts of the oiginal are recognizable.

Quick hiss? Like a two or three second blast of escaping air noise and the rest of the long show is silent? That’s the symptom of having a bad compression or a sound file format that Audacity doesn’t recognize, but Windows Media doesn’t work like that. It just won’t play them.

Right up against the wall.

Right Click on one of the bad files > Properties > Advanced or Summary. See if you can get Windows to tell you what kind of file it thinks you have.

Koz

This is just a wild suggestion but…
I have recently experienced some apparently random corruption of files (all kinds of files: jpegs, mp3s, word documents, etc.). The symptoms have been replacing parts of the contents with garbage and also reduction of file size down to zero bytes. My suite of “anti-invasion” software - Microsoft Security Essentials, Iobit’s Advanced System Care Pro, and Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware - all say there is no sign of infection by any “nasties”. My current hypothesis is that the external USB drive may be starting to fail. Thankfully, I think I caught the problem before the corrupted data had migrated all the way through my three-tier backups. Is it possible you are experiencing some kind of hard drive fault?