Issues with Exporting .mp3s

Hello from Argentina,

I have been using Audacity since 2014 and I have not had problems until yesterday. Here is what is happening to me. Since 2014, I normally record audio from pro wrestling events and like I said before, I have not had problems until recently. When I record the audio, I click on export to .mp3 and from what it seems, the audio is saved normally into a .mp3 file. However, when I want to play it, it seems the duration is 0:00 with no audio, which means I did not save nothing at all.

At first, I supposed it was due to using an old version of Audacity, which I downloaded in mid-2014 (probably August), so I re-installed the program and the problem is still there. To clarify, I am currently using Windows 7.

This is first time I have this kind of issue and I could not find nothing on Google, so I have to ask here.

Cheers.

Please try this and let us know what happens:

  1. Shut down your computer (completely, not just “sleep”), the reboot. This is to reduce the chance that something running in the background is causing the problem.
  2. Launch Audacity
  3. From the Generate menu, generate a 30 second duration tone.
  4. Press Play and ensure that it plays.
  5. Export as a WAV file, and call it “export-test.wav” (without quotes)
  6. Export as an MP3 file, and call it “export-test.mp3” (without quotes)
  7. Test the WAV and MP3 files in your usual media player
  8. Import both the WAV and the MP3 files into Audacity and check them (If you play them, use the track Solo buttons to play one at a time, or it will probably sound extremely loud and distorted).

so I re-installed the program and the problem is still there.

Did you re-download and re-install [u]LAME[/u]? Make sure to download and install the Audacity version of LAME. Does Audacity find LAME when you check [u]Edit > Preferences > Libraries[/u]?

…As a work-around, you can export to WAV (or FLAC) and then use a 3rd-party MP3 encoder. When I just need to make an MP3 (without any editing) I’ve been using [u]TAudioConverter[/u]. …It can convert to/from several different formats and once it’s set-up it’s just drag, drop, and click. And, you can drag-in several files at once.